(no subject)

[andalus]

reading: not much, but when I do it's crowley's short stories, welty, finally getting around to hölderlin. listening: it comes and goes. writing exclusively short fiction. ! Which is refreshing and addictive. if poetry is like diving into depths beyond your endurance and snatching at whatever pearls you think you might see, fiction is like giving a guided tour of the pearlful waters. it demands a passing knowledge of the depths, but doesn't demand you demonstrate them. I've rediscovered a love of dialogue that I'd almost forgotten. I still hate plot, and the stories usually have nothing happen, people talking but nothing getting said. In fiction you are able to create a space where someone can be redeemed. This is the only place where redemption can happen, redemption is a story.

So much of everything is wrong. Not merely bad, like junk food or action movies or organized sports, things that we know are bad but want anyway, but wrong: We know they are bad and we do not want them, yet there they are. Nearly everything is wrong. What is one to do? One can say, things are better than they were, on the whole, if we can just change one bad thing a year, or a decade, then in some future things will be good. not minding that we'll be dead by then. But to even change one thing you have to inure yourself to nine hundred ninety nine others, by the end of that how can you even know what's right and wrong anymore? the good is locked in the bad like a catacomb, you get lost trying to find it, even if you do find it. no amount of moves will put the checker onto the red square, not even kings. art is the only thing that can remind you of it.

I'm no utopian, I know the only world I want to live in is imaginary, and I know it matters to me so much more than the real world.

I know this is dangerous.

Comments

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

This is great. Just saying.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Literature = an escape mode that convinces you it isn't one, so you can escape without feeling guilty, assuming instead that you're learning or experiencing something true?

[andalus.livejournal.com]

literature: a good (the best) argument for escapism? the arguments for realism are obvious and don't get anyone nowhere.