Untitled documentache

I tried to title this entry “After earache” because I always title my entries before I write them, and yesterday I had a pain in my left ear which I assumed was caused by a cancerous tumor in my brain, but then today I awoke without even the slightest discomfort, so I assume that the tumor simply vanished overnight via miracle: because I prayed to Zagreus, and Zagreus healed ourself; but the computer file whose name I was attempting to manipulate only half-listened to me, so the “–ache” part of my intended title “After earache” got affixed to the ass end of the computer file’s birth-name “Untitled document”, thus accomplishing my creative mission auto-ly.

Oh & here’s the obligatory image: it’s the next page from my book of 300 Drawing Prompts (the last appeared on 2 July); the prompt for this current drawing appropriately was "Weeping willows".

Dear diary,

The only reason I ever wrote any entries here is that I was interested in hearing what I had to say. I assumed that no one else would care to read these confessions. It seems weird to me that oneself does not know what oneself wants to say until one says it. But that’s cuz thots are different than speech. My words in these journal entries are as different from the thots that they claim to convey as any English translation of the Iliad is different from the Iliad. And then just think of what the Iliad looked like before it was Greek. Before it was text, and before it was speech...

Anyway, I just wanted to note for myself that I’m not interested in listening to myself any longer. That doesn’t mean that I’m gonna stop writing entries — not even death could stop me from writing further entries — I just am probably not going to keep adding so many lies here so darned frequently. Actually, let’s just say it: This will be the final entry. That way, the next time I write here, I can get that wonderful feeling of breaking a law.

But this morning I felt like typing. I really do love the feeling and sound of my fingers clicking upon the keyboard. I’m not one of those foolish writers who has a sentimental attachment to the utensils of bygone ages, to tools like the typewriter. I hate typewriters: they’re noisy, plus they’re hard to edit with — when you make a mistake, you’ve gotta back up physically and blot the characters with vanishing cream. Plus the carriage always dings in an annoying fashion when you reach the end of a line. (It’s the same bell-noise that happens when you work in a diner and an order gets expedited: Your burger is ready.) And if you wanna drag a paragraph from one place to another — say that you’ve chosen to relocate the end of your story to the beginning, so that the scene where the butler murders everyone else in the mansion is now the shocking start of your tale, and then you wanna take the scene at the police station, where the bad cops are beating up the butler and screaming “We will continue to harm you until you tell us who killed all those people in the mansion!” I say, if you wanna shift the dramatic placement of this intense conflict, which previously stood at the opening of your masterwork, thus moving it to the conclusion, so that the story originates with the sin and concludes with a fruitless inquisition, you’ll need to grab shears and transparent tape to cut and reposition physically the respective sections of your text, if you’re living in the days of manual typewriters. That’s why I hate typewriters.

And quill pens are nice, but they require too much inkwell dipping, which action interrupts the flow of my thot. Thot Über Alles, that’s my motto.

Yet the keys on a computer keyboard, even tho I hate computers to death, are a type of perfection. They’re polite but still assertive: they indicate when you’ve successfully pressed them, so that you’re not left in doubt of your accomplishments, but they don’t boom the news across the street to all your neighbors; they just whisper your progress into the immediate vicinity: clickety-click. A still small voice. I enjoy that sound, and I am thrilled to become one flesh with the gist of that sound, which is why I write so well. You’ve gotta love the tools of your trade, in order to be a pro at what you do. Cuz the reward is exclusively in the doing: Nobody’s gonna pay you for your genius. As Blake’s Enion always sez, in The Four Zoas:

Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy.

And I’ve been wondering a lot lately, before I decided to just stop traveling, about what path to take: Should I continue to record my thots here in this journal, so that I can be a genuine journalist, self-taught and unloved; OR should I let myself perform further irresponsible experiments with written words, like I did with Vol 1 and Vol 2 of my Collected Self-Amusements?

I conclude that it’s better to stick with recording thots, cuz as long as I keep adding to the pages of this public-private diary, it’ll only get bigger, and people will just stare at it and wonder why it’s so obnoxiously large (it blocks out the sun): Why was this author so arrogant as to think that we all need to be exposed to so much of his thots?

But I like that idea because people who come alive and burst out of the womb after this “Bryan Ray” model has expired will not know a thing: they won’t even know how to have a single thot, until someone teaches them; and if they stumble upon the big blank that these entries contain, the future-person will learn to think in my thot-tongue (I mean “tongue” as in “language”, like one’s “native tongue”; but I like that, on reading it, you literalized that hyphenated phrase and imagined an actual muscle writhing about in the mind), and she will be able to continue the process of making God better. For instance:

My sweetheart and I have been re-reading Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy, and I’m amazed at how far ahead that text still is. It’s still over the horizon. (Will it be far ahead forever?) Here’s a passage from section 10 — it could stand as the summarization of my spiritual belief, not because I want to believe it, not because I have faith or trust in it, but because it naturally matches the way that I can’t help but think; it’s like I can’t escape from its force: I have no choice in the matter, it just rings true:

...the one truly real Dionysus appears in a variety of forms, in the mask of a fighting hero, and entangled, as it were, in the net of the individual will. The god who appears talks and acts so as to resemble an erring, striving, suffering individual. That he appears at all with such epic precision and clarity is the work of the dream-interpreter, Apollo, who through this symbolic appearance interprets to the chorus its Dionysian state. In truth, however, the hero is the suffering Dionysus of the Mysteries, the god experiencing in himself the agonies of individuation, of whom wonderful myths tell that as a boy he was torn to pieces by the Titans and now is worshiped in this state as Zagreus. Thus it is intimated that this dismemberment, the properly Dionysian suffering, is like a transformation into air, water, earth, and fire, that we are therefore to regard the state of individuation as the origin and primal cause of all suffering, as something objectionable in itself. From the smile of this Dionysus sprang the Olympian gods, from his tears sprang man. In this existence as a dismembered god, Dionysus possesses the dual nature of a cruel, barbarized demon and a mild, gentle ruler. But the hope of the epopts [those initiated into the mysteries] looked toward a rebirth of Dionysus, which we must now dimly conceive as the end of individuation. It was for this coming third Dionysus that the epopts’ roaring hymns of joy resounded. And it is this hope alone that casts a gleam of joy upon the features of a world torn asunder and shattered into individuals; this is symbolized in the myth of Demeter, sunk in eternal sorrow, who rejoices again for the first time when told that she may once more give birth to Dionysus. This view of things already provides us with all the elements of a profound and pessimistic view of the world, together with the mystery doctrine of tragedy: the fundamental knowledge of the oneness of everything existent, the conception of individuation as the primal cause of evil, and of art as the joyous hope that the spell of individuation may be broken in augury of a restored oneness.

Again, that’s from Nietzsche’s earliest book (in Walter Kaufmann’s translation). Only Oscar Wilde, among writers, seems equally far-reaching in his provocations. Wilde and Nietzsche are two thinkers who have offered profundities that the current age has STILL not unwrapt. Their writings are like presents under the Xmas tree (representing the tree of the knowledge of good and evil… unless it represents the tree of life — or perhaps they’re both the same tree… anyway, the point is that it’s better to receive than it is to give gifts on Xmas, so why would we leave this mountain of gorgeous offerings from Nietzsche and Wilde untouched and intact?)...

I repeat: the above passage could stand as my religion’s mad dogma, the way that some Christians claim the Apostle Paul’s book blurb “Saved by faith in Christ’s ultimate sacrifice” as their hope (which, unfolded, goes like so: The first Man was created perfect by God, but then this Man sinned, yet God didn’t want to slay Man for Man’s sin, lest the movie end too soon, so God slew some animals instead and called it even, but sooner or later God grew tired of killing innocent animals to cover Man’s wickedness, for sin is inheritable, so God raped himself and gave birth to his own alter ego, which committed suicide in the form of Baby Jesus, so this Divine Abortion was the Perfect Sacrifice and thus no longer are humans required to slay animals except in factory farms which provide United Statesians with their girth, so that they may be fattened for the ultimate slaughter on Armageddon Day, which is unlike Xmas; in short, Christ’s blood was shed for all, and now all are saved from Hell, whether we like it or not: we can’t even go there on vacation, to walk among the fires experiencing “delight with the enjoyments of Genius; which to Angels look like torment and insanity”, as Blake writes in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, no: blinded by the blood of his perfect sacrifice, God can no longer distinguish the sheep from the goats, so at last he admits “every thing that lives is Holy”, yet again quoting Blake, as is God’s wont, thus even the bulls are now allowed inside of the china shop) — yes, I hold Nietzsche’s summarization of Dionysian suffering as the happy alternative to Pauline Christianity. And I think that the so-called historical Jesus of Nazareth has little to do with the Christ on St. Paul’s billboard: not only do I say that this Jesus (the true one) was a Buddhist, but he seems to me to be the latest incarnation of Dionysus. A sickly birth for a sickly age. And let us render this last instance the sickliest ever, by refusing to descend any further into the counter-divine vulgarities of “rugged individualism” and privatization.

Yes, since you asked, I am indeed “proud to have soured this entry by vaguely referencing modern political doctrine”; tho I wouldn’t have worded it that way myself, exactly.