streams

• We haven’t learnt our lessons yet.
• The population is merely an interruption to a larger purpose.
• How do we overcome madness without defeating peace?
• They worked or pretended to for their freedom. I pretend to be free and do not work.
• Every word has always been a painful journey.
• Sometimes they’ll let you live, if you’ve died enough. But what use is dying? Especially if we only die to experience living?
• To become better, you begin with suffering.
• You can’t tell blood from water on tar. Rain and blood flows along our roads. We shan’t forget the roads that our blood has travelled.
• Little by little, the hour grows on me and I wait for end. Only to find the end is gone. I am new every minute.
• First, we scare them; then we make them believe what we want them to believe; then we separate them according to what they believe; then we murder them because they believe differently. We are powerful because they are scared, not because they do not believe as we do. Our power is over dead people.
• Focus on the word. This word shall set you free. Your mind is free. Your mind has experience it can shape into freedom. It started when you were young. Now it fears success. Or it fears fear itself. I am shaped by the fear of the outside. When I awake every morning, I dream of only becoming, not being. I am.
• I have the language within me, even the words, but no voice. It is voiceless speech trying to convince me.
• I cannot tell a story that I do not know. I cannot relate the stories in my own life. How can I write without writing? How can I tell a story without telling a story?
• Monotony forces my laziness to inspire work. And then I write these words as if they were a cure to monotony.
• Why do I live at all if the only living I do is in dreams?
• I fight cowardice with heroic fantasies. I fight the fear of loss by dreaming of self-confidence. I fight the fear of failure by chasing rainbows across my clouded mind. I battle with the agonies of hard work by pretending to be genius. And then I wonder why life is so unreal.
• I have to know and accept one thing and one thing alone. Knowing and accepting this one thing will save me. This one thing is unknowable and unacceptable.
• Deadlines are fearsome creatures set up by people afraid of time and eternity. If it didn’t end today, it would never end. This is a deadline.
• Forcing myself is an act of malice intended to wound me where it hurts me the most, my lazy bone.
• Every act of writing is an act of atonement for thirteen years of abandonment. I must keep writing until that guilt is overcome and the act atoned entirely. Thirteen more years will not suffice.
• I lost my voice some years ago; I lost it twice; the first when I stopped singing and the second when I stopped writing.
• This whip that I use to lash against my skin, using my own weary hands that are entitled to nothing, scars only the outside. What of the inside? What whip can dig into my fear and scar it for ever?
• I have to write, because it is a prejudice against not acting, not writing, and indeed not existing.
• Who will believe that the road I have travelled was of no consequence, if I told them of my desire to walk back? How can I ever return to a place I didn’t start at?
• Pessimism is the only answer to prejudice. Optimism is itself prejudice.
• Create he says and we only create god. We create a perfection that exists for no reason but that we can believe in perfection. Then we turn our creation into making us believe of our mortality. What use is creation if perfection existed only to prove we were non-existent?
• Live and die the only two commandments in this entire world. That simply can become an entire life of celebration or an everlasting search for discontinuity. But how do we end if we didn’t know we began?
• Whether god lives or not, belief is not a way to reach it. It doesn’t matter whether you believe or not. It doesn’t care.
• There are these roads of hope. Each emanates from the life source of desire. Each takes me through the terrors of the mind and the wickedness that others are capable of. But each become dead-ends. Why hope when desire is gone?
• Why give me incredible ambition and an ability to know what is imperfect and then not give me talent?
• These roads begin beneath my feet. They’ll go where I take them.
• Someone else will pray for me. Maybe my mother who believes, maybe my father who is dead or my brother who doesn’t know if he believes but follows belief anyway. Maybe my friends who’ve seen my goodness or maybe my lovers who’ve seen me inside. All my imperfections lead me to land on my knees. But still, someone else prays instead.
• How do I write prose without sounding like poetry?
• Describe, let’s describe what needs description. A loud sound perhaps, that announces the arrival of the beginning. Or maybe a bright colour that can tell stories with feeling. Or then again a polite touch that can breathe openly about loving and being loved. These are the clothes of a written journey. Wear each in its own robes, and travel.
• My mother is pushed down by a desire to be a successful wife, mother, daughter and other self-defined status that can traditionally mean she is a goddess or today mean that she is average; like everyone else.
• Each boy I dream of is a resounding no to the mockery they call living.
• Taste my blood and it reeks of sloth. Cut my skin and my blood will not fall, it is too lazy to leave my feverish body.
• A niche inside a genre inside an aegis inside a concept inside a framework that has nothing to do with the universe or the particular.
• An abominable desire to do right but no courage to do it.
• Good intentions pay their way into heaven.
• Tell me my story. You’ve heard it before haven’t you? It began with your wanting to tell a story. It became my story when I lived through it and then you had a story to tell. Tell it to me. Isn't that what writers do?
• I feel the anguish of my memories. I suffer the pains of my past. But who can bring to me my smile?
• My best life was before I lived it. Once I lived it, it was misery.
• We tell stories in the hope that we can be our own heroes. Each telling is a performance of our heroism. Each heroism is an achievement over our simple unheroic lives.
• Dance through the language, through voice, in the hope that when the voice ends, the music will inspire writing.
• I must write, this much is understood. But what?
• I used to think that I would explore a new writing style that I would base on the stream-of-consciousness technique. I’d call it the stream-of-conflict. But I discovered all conflict is simply consciousness.
• “Without poetry, all is lost” said the pessimist. “If all is lost, there is still poetry” said the optimist.