I'm afraid of writing (part 1)

Really I'm scared of everything, and this is just what I'm doing right now.

As most of this has now become, an offspring of nightmarishness and freedom, an attempt to explain all the things which cloud my ability to see things as they are. In these days I wonder if I should aim at things that make so little sense and likely have no definite answer, and become even more cloudy with my misinterpretation. Unanswerable things are too abstract to prove but feel so very real, possibly more real than anything else, inside of an imagination that has yet to rest. But in attempts like these, someday a time comes when limitation is found and the fabric of human nature is tested.

Is the imagination constrained the same?

Time has not told that story.

So enjoy this story while it lasts, while I last in a mindset unset, disturbed, testing where an imagination may lead the morally unencumbered, but oh so burdened soul.

As always… I hope you persist in enjoyment on this little stroll into my mind, as it may seem so dark and strange, but can be done with a smile and light giggle as you walk all the intricate pathways which lead to mythical representations of a life experienced, rather than taught.

Most of all I write because I am afraid of becoming all my thoughts, because I know where they go, I know what happens when I lose control and more thoughts lead to more thoughts and I poke around in thin spaces of peace for an understanding of what I am. It is a world this world does not want to see. True freedom, the type no-one will speak of, is grotesque and selfish and seeks to satisfy even the things that one does not want—all the programmed things that appear sexy and alluring, but are so gory and terrible. Maybe the mind wants to prove it can have everything so it seeks to take all that is us and reform it into monstrosities which consume everything. Some desires form through regret, born originally in mischievous childlike wonder, and unsatisfied grow into uncontrollable golems. The creature living out the desire is far from ourselves as we are possessed in compulsive bedevilments. Fantasy lives optimistically, inspired by pleasurable result, but the end is never as was planned. Some worlds are not to be explored, at least not for the faint of heart, unless we seek to meet all of our fallen angels.

Fear is innate in some places, eerie places where the light shifts just right and quiet allows for the imagination to have its way with every shadow sway and phantom creak and whine in the distance. As creators of all that creepiness, thoughts are our worst enemy, and lonely walks home are full of intrusive perception.

Thoughts are always creeping in the shadows, waiting for our next mistake.

But I am not so experienced that I can decide to bring a thought to a word—to the world—as a means to share, to validate a self, to relieve all that is inside wanting to be uncaged upon another in savagery; or just to be a wandering thing of undirected shared experience, a source of melting barriers. If it is all of that and more, writing is externalized thought and the action weaves the thoughts. I cautiously approach the activity, concerned that I may be quilting my next identity and infecting the world with everything I wish I could keep from becoming.

Be careful... you become your fears.

It is a fear I encounter often and I'm afraid of becoming this one most of all. To me, writing seems to be the closest we can represent a thought with—as mine appear as words, loosely connected, creating theories which stem from the mixture of experience and wonder. I don't know how many voices are in my head, but they all seem to coalesce around central topics which expand from a core of knotted confusion. It all feels less like knowledge and more like a civil war with no generals to keep the fighting orderly. But this, what you read, is in some ways ordered, as it has to be for you to attempt to believe you understand it. And though you read in your voice imagining that these are my ideas, they are a nefarious combination of all the yous I've ever met, and in meeting you I add a new voice to my already dense network of screams. But I have learned, and continue to need to train myself to mash those voices into symphonic understanding which sounds very much like me listening to my insides. In expression, the voices tire and settle into practicality, letting all the answerlessness fade and blend into the background.

Experiencing this format is the closest thing to exposing my consciousness, or the many fractal versions of what I understand that to be.

Though even that has now come into question... is consciousness my thoughts, my expression, some interpretation of sensory input, or much much more than anyone can attempt to explain?

And of course I overanalyze everything.

Could I possibly write without any analysis or thought or any sort of input?

Maybe then it would be my consciousness speaking to yours, as long as you have set aside thought for this moment too. I guess for any of that to be possible we would have to come to an agreement, right now, and for every moment that you return to this, that we were both going to not take life so seriously for however long this connection plays out.

Even if we both agreed and made some intent to honor that bond, could either of us fully commit?

Could both of us do it in some simultaneous time delay?

Maybe writing is humanity's inefficient and unidirectional ability to time travel. I write to a future you and you read a past me. As you read this I am already writing the next thing, embodying a whole new set of thoughts. And you, possibly finding this so bewildering, may set down the reading and be perplexed in your own mind, trying to sort all that I mean between what you see as true while we both wait for clarity to free us to become one.

We all travel through time in books, forgetting that the clock ticks in this dimension and has for unknown more in the process of creation.

But really, would any thought or speech or writing be necessary if our consciousness was purely connected?

Writing is more evolutionary time travel than anything else. As we read the past and carry it forward the ideas evolve within our current understanding, the new developments, and the experiments that either disprove or enhance the ideas of visionaries past. Thus life may be a game of creating time for timeless things, or increasing the ability to share in timelessness for however long it lasts.

That never stopped my mind from torturing me with thoughts that I wasted life tapping, scribbling, or echoing words inside my head when I could be out in the woods or sea or on a mountain top instead.

So I invite fear into my world and call it my friend as I learn all the things that that fear would do here. I use fear as an indication of what I am to do next. It is a sort of signal, like envy is a message of what we want. It seems that the human frontal consciousness hides all these motivations in the subconscious. Something that always controlled me was the fear of showing someone who I really am. It's something that can only be hidden for so long in the writing. There's a feeling to everything artistic. It's almost as if you don't need the words because something else entirely is speaking to you. I don't know what the words are for, but to me they represent portals into my subconscious.

I fear we may already be tinkering in places we should not go, particularly in each other's minds, in the form of advertising and marking and all other exploitatious behaviors. It terrifies me because everyone knows both the master and the slave are degraded in exploitation, possibly the master even more, for he must live with devaluing another life and consequently devaluing the love of everyone around him.

So, ever more, I descend into the subconscious by whatever means available to really see what controls human beings.

The mind can be viewed as a computer, in a simplistic sense. In random access memory (RAM), our subconscious pulls a non-direct string of information from another place (hard drive). It is nearly synonymous to our machines, where the central processing unit (CPU) routes the whole thing: using the subconscious, information, and pathways to construct actions. So RAM can be thought of as emotions (among other things), obscured. When those areas of our consciousness are full, nothing else matters. We are too focused on one activity, and the computer freezes. It is no surprise that computers were built on these principles, machines have always been a representation of humanity de-biologized. A dirt bike makes us a cheetah, the airplane a bird, SCUBA a fish, and the list goes on. Once a machine is mastered it becomes an extension of the body and mind. To the subconscious we become more than human, mechanized. The conscious mind's only job post-mastery is trusting the action is built on good-will.

What is this supercomputer in our pocket but another little mind, with all its predictions and understandings, and near limitless knowledge to penetrate our skull through our eyes and puppeteer our emotions and perception.

But we aren't as simple as these machines. Complexity decreases as the next iteration of our expression synthesizes, so machines will never have everything that we are, but will only have what segmented expression we were able to access in those moments. Just as a cat surprises itself in a mirror, we will never fully understand what we are because you cannot dissect a living organism completely without altering it. And especially not with tools that are created by the thing we want to understand. And especially especially if that organism is you. So part of me explores writing as a means to alter the locus of perception, so I may attempt to observe my own thoughts. Often, almost every time, when I write a piece I am not embodied in a self, and I forget I have hands to type, or that my feet are somewhere. Uprooted my back slumps and neck screams and eyes bloodshoot from tinkering unblinking. And I tire imagining I am the page and the words or the story in between it all. But I am not tired during that consciousness, not until it ends. Then when I look back I find that the next sentence wasn't planned or created, it spawned from the previous one as if all I had to do was start, and the words finished themselves. I return in a different state entirely to decode all the things that I hardly created and rather watched happening as simply an interpreter.

Then I wonder... who created all this, and for what?

I guess I could experience the whole thing simultaneously, a universal consciousness of the noises about me, the clacking of the dishes or rumble of the garbage truck, or the birds whose beauty is drowned out by all our human commotion. Then I would have to listen to my keys clack and my fingers tap and watch the whole thing as if even the body was not myself and wonder if I could see past my nose for a moment, or if I could just close my eyes and write and wonder what would come out and maybe then I wouldn't have to edit or rearrange for someone else to see it all the same. I would have to invite all of sensation, including my complex emotionally fragility, and all of my past and future and empathic understanding of those I care for. And all of it would be so massive and indescribable that I would simply have to sit in saturated awareness. And I wish it was that but it can't be, because when I return as a logic mind I see all the incongruence, as if the brush jumped along the page with shaky hands. And I wonder which part of me was inadequate in that moment, or if the distractions did the jumping, or if the fact that I use words limits my ability to paint an entire picture by myself. Or if it was a fundamental limitation and I really couldn’t achieve the aim, but tried, blotting all the color I could possibly blot onto a page and layering all the strokes with paint straight from the tube. But I would never be able to un-blend all of the textures and see how everything built perfectly into a gob of beauty. And alone, even if you watched the entire thing form and remembered precisely how it was crafted, you would never know. You would just look on in amazement or disgust, and wonder what possibly could have been tormenting the creator in those moments.

Because at the other end is you, and without someone to read, the words never animate, leaving me wondering endlessly.

Even you watching me create wouldn’t be enough for you to see it all and I’ll never know how you felt when these words entered your mind. Even a response wouldn't show you to me, because it would just be a continuation of my dream. If I create the dream I create you too, and again I am just talking to myself. What I really want is to live in your dreams for a minute, so I can know what it's like to be human, or for just a moment to take a break from mine, mine which continues to expand upon itself, reproducing with each investment in focus. And maybe you wish for the same when you spend time in my thoughts, to take a break from yours. Or maybe neither of us know anything and are already living in each others’ dreams as a compatible consciousness observing itself.

I don't know if I can ever know what it is to be human, just as I can't know what it is to be writer. I just watch both and play the role simultaneously, and pretend that nobody is watching. And one day I may know this, what it is to be me. But even then I'd be limited because I'd just have my secular reality, and it would jump around and point at other realities and question which is the truth. I would be in my dream forever, several layers deep, thinking it was all very real.

What humans crave most is someone to share their reality with

and we extend our arms impossibly, hoping others see the same

but they don’t, and we won’t

so I wonder… are we all insane?

Really I'm afraid of seeing you as you because it may show me the worst of me, that which I fear most, and wished I didn't have to share.