For a while now, I’ve been trying to decide if I should keep spending energy on Twitter or throw in the towel. So, over the last month, I did an experiment: I posted as much stuff as I could and gave my best shot to participating. But I got no results; therefore I’m declaring my experiment to be a success: now I can abandon the place without remorse. Official verdict: my Twitter career was a dud. (I won’t delete my account, I just won’t check it anymore — I’ve already given it much more care than it deserved.)
So, below is my final tickertape of tweets. Recently I posted what I thought might be the first of many such collections; but it turns out that this idea was only worth two rounds.
SWAN SONG
(last tweets)
Why do so many people care about “How to become a good writer”? Just remain a bad writer; that’s what I did, & I feel fine. — Come, take my hand & let’s be bad writers together.
There is a world outside my being, and there is a world inside my being. I’m more of a border BETWEEN worlds than a creature IN a world. And the exterior world is unwelcoming, and the interior world is unwelcoming.
Alcohol is appealing because it relaxes my inner world. I’m unaware of any equivalent elixir that could relax the outer world. The outer world is shackled to sobriety.
If you insist on plunging your hand into your own chest & ripping out your vital organs, at least use a proper receptacle to dispose of the waste, when you are finished.
Whenever possible, avoid gluing all your doors and windows shut; for, if you’re unable to open them, it’s hard to vent poisonous fumes.
I like the view of the Areopagus from the Acropolis.
Before the advent of radio & TV, if people wanted to hear music or view a drama, they would need to play their own banjo & sing with their family; go see a live play, or put one on with their friends at the saloon. And there was no Internet, so the porn was just painted statues.
Spy tip: If you want to remain incognito, just do something good. Good deeds are always ignored.
I’ve really been enjoying reading the Autobiography of Mark Twain; I’m half thru Vol. 1, & it’s all over the map, so exuberant, like an explosion in a shingle factory. Just now I reached a part where he talks about Turkey Day, so I copied it to my WP blog: right here.
Where I live, “daylight saving time” causes sundown to occur around 4:30 pm, so it’s as dark as night before most people have even eaten supper. I like it this way. I wish it were dark all the time.
You say that, where you’re from, the birds sing a pretty song and there’s always music in the air? Well, where I’m from, the crows caw angrily over the sound of lawn-mowers and leaf-blowers.
Things I have mastered:
- language
- mathematics
- law
- religion
- logic
- art
- love
In Beckett’s DREAM OF FAIR TO MIDDLING WOMEN, Belacqua sez: “The reality of the individual...is an incoherent reality and must be expressed incoherently...”
My only problem with that statement is the word “must”; it may or may not be expressed incoherently: Either way is A-okay.
The aspect of my literary masterworks that that gives me the most pride is simply knowing that they shall grow into conventions & then ultimately into signifiers of “true reality”.
I have much more faith in everlasting life than I do in the safety of U.S. bridges.
My favorite word is and.
If I had to pack a suitcase, I know what I’d put in it. I pack clothes, writing utensils, notebooks, table salt, table wine, pizza, fresh fish, potable water, and a folding chair.
Even when a situation is bad, I can find fragments of goodness in it. So I focus on these bits of good, & this makes the general badness seem more tolerable. At that point, whatever caused the initial bad gets worse; so I begin my search for even tinier fragments of goodness.
I truly believe that there are folks out there who think that everything is coming along just fine.
Has anyone ever made a living? I’ve never seen anyone make a living.
I’m a good dancer.
Yuck! I never plan what I’m going to write each morning, so sometimes I end up with dull blog posts about scripture, like I did today... So, to rub my snout in it, here’s a half-baked opinion on a few things that nobody cares about.
Do you still substitute whisky for milk in your breakfast cereal? Why or why not?
I like to ask questions; I find that it helps to pass the time. For instance, if something happens, I ask about it. Sometimes I get an answer, sometimes I don’t.
What did people DO, back in the olden days?
“People who say they will first die and then arise are mistaken. If they do not first receive resurrection while they are alive, once they have died they will receive nothing.”
—from The Gospel According to Philip (79)
“The world came into being through transgression. For the agent that made it wanted to make it incorruptible and immortal. That agent fell, and did not attain what was expected.”
—from The Gospel According to Philip (85)
“It is in the world, where power and weakness exist, that the act of joining between males and females occurs; but in the eternal realm there is a different sort of joining.”
—from The Gospel According to Philip (88)
If we humans had been born with metal feet, and the grass were magnetized with a repelling polarity, then, instead of paving paths thru the rainforest and inventing roller skates, we could just glide around naturally, and there would be no pain or suffering in the world.
Here is something that I admire about little children. Say you give a very young child a gift for their birthday: After unwrapping it, they toss away the toy and begin to play with the box that it was packaged in. Cats do this too.
I like how people dressed in the U.S.A. around the 1940s & 50s. The way that people dress nowadays (I write this in the early 21st century) is not good: Let us repent of our errors & embrace those preceding styles. Everything from back then is classic; it still looks great.
I might understand the desire for global domination, if an individual could exist in manifold places at once; but, since we mortals are tethered to our body, all I care about is the area directly surrounding my face. Therefore, lock me in jail. Just let me rot in jail.
10 comments:
Do you know what the thing is about Bryan’s writing for me? The thing is, even one of his sentences send my brain off into some far off place. Which makes it really difficult for me to read a lot of his writing at once. It’s like each sentence is packed with so much implied and abstract meaning that I cannot concentrate because my brain must explore all the possibilities.
Exactly!!! I always feel like I want to (& need to) dig into every single little bit of meaning or reference or even every thought that I get while reading -- wanting to understand & comprehend & analyse & not least feel all of it, as fully as possible -- which means I'll easily spend half or whole days whenever reading one of these blog posts. And I know that's of course solely something I put on myself and not at all as it was intended, but still, I really can't help or avoid it, probably because I don't really want to :P
You know, as I once told you, Bryan (& I remember you even quoting me for it:) ;
"Every word of Bryan Ray's writing expand in multible directions like tentacle forestfireworks of the mind."
I was so right on that one, ha!
Ah it makes my day to see these friendly replies; I'm touched that anyone went to the trouble of suffering thru this blog network's awful commenting interface; I know how annoying it is...
Since this place doesn't have the option of tagging or replying directly (it just displays each new comment in a growing thread, in the order in which they were posted, without notifying anyone specifically), I'll type my responses to both of ye into the same text box here, as if all three of us are sitting at one table and drinking absinthe together...
Dear Frazzled, thank you so much for your kind words! I'm happy to hear you say that you're taken "into some far off place", because I am a firm believer in escapism; it's basically my religion; and I love that you see in my text possibilities to explore, because, instead of aiming for exactitude and ciphering to a cent, my desire is to expand the mind onward and outward...
& dear annaname, I love that quoted compliment very much: I wear it proudly everywhere I go! I also take it as high praise (because I myself react the same to the writers I admire) when you mention "wanting to understand & comprehend & analyse" etc.; my steadfast hope is that all this text-wrestling remains fun and never descends into agony...
Yes, both of your comments have moved me to stand up and give an impromptu speech to the entire venue (if we were really at a restaurant, I would make a spectacle of myself right now by talking too loudly, thus causing the surrounding diners to hush up and give ear to my affected ravings)... I want an everlasting adventure into potential! I only hope that I can learn to lure us all (myself included) to relax during this journey, let go & let be; for I feel that art fails if it does not give the beholder at least some type of pleasure. So I hope that if my compositions seem difficult, it's not a MERE difficulty but rather a difficult pleasure. I feel a kinship and siblinghood with writers like Gertrude Stein and Edward Lear, where sound is often more important than sense, and style is valued over substance. I think it's good to starburst grammar and shake the meaning out of words, just to show them who's boss. Let us PLAY with complex forms of speech (scientific and philosophical phrasing, etc.) like we did when we were children still only on the verge of learning language.
"...as if all three of us are sitting at one table and drinking absinthe together..." Wait, I was sort of convinced that was actually the case?! -At least on a mind level, I know we are! :)
Now, sitting at this table (never really getting up let alone leaving, no wonder we're slightly tipsy by now) we are most definitely talking at a volume that would be considered "too loudly" by anyone else, however, have no worries, as my Frazzled T & I have already long decided that we need not to bother or allow ourselves to be held back the slightest by such mundane pettiness! Anyone attempting to hush you into silence would obviously be out of their right minds and I'd personally fight them in a duel of words any day!
Besides Gertrude Stein and Edward Lear, you might want to add my local postpunkrockband Blood Child to your feeling of kinship and siblinghood, as what you said about "sound is often more important than sense" is (as you know) more or less their lyrical mantra! -which I actually only believe I came to understand fully after talking to you about it.
Also, you need not to worry as for 'difficult pleasure'('pleasure' being the key word here) as that is most definitely what it is, as with anything truly important and worth being intensely interested in and passionate about in the first place, exploring meaning and expanding both our minds and our comprehension - which, after all, really is our very reason and purpose of sitting here at this table in the first place, talking to each other about everything that needs to be shared and debated and turned on its head and thought thoroughly through more than one mind, since that appaers to me to be how we often reach the true essence of all things that truly matter.
For my part, I feel immensely happy and honored to share any table with you - both!
I'm shocked to hear that you have “local postpunkrockbands” — I'm jealous, because where I live, we have no bands of any type, least of all punk, whether pre, post, or present. (All we have here are church choirs.) But I thank you for giving me the opportunity to voice a phrase that I've always wanted to say: I will certainly check out Blood Child.
In fact, just now, I typed that band name into a search engine, but I added no other qualifiers, and the results were all very sad: I was given a long list of medical articles detailing causes of bleeding in children. So I quickly added other terms to narrow the search, and then I found a few reviews in magazines, some of which contained interviews with the band; and while reading I grew pleased that you associated my own stance with theirs. I smiled at what I found — here's a quote from the article “Blood Child: Confident Silence”...
“For us it has always been more about the pure sound of the words, and not so much about their exact meaning... It's about the instantaneous, the intuitive and the imperfections of things that occur in the moment... Words before language. 'Abandon language' is the message; oppose the systematic expectation for things to be done in a certain way.”
I like that VERY much! I hope the band accepts my application for membership. I could be their official mascot: “Here is Bryan Ray of Blood Child: he writes books for the illiterate.” The only red flag that might arise if they perform a background check, is that there are records of me delivering public speeches at various libraries, in which I declare that, as much as the abandonment thereof, language is itself a fruition of absurdity. And that's why I embrace both chaos AND order. I love all things. Having learned to digest not only poison but fine cuisine, I season my caviar with cyanide.
Now I can't resist copying a quotation from the Taschen book by Jacques Meuris on Rene Magritte. I hope that Blood Child would approve.
When he said: “If I were really an artist-painter...” he must have meant that in reality he was not. But then what was he? A scandalous malcontent, constantly stoking up our fears with sinister pictures and riddles? Absolutely! For this unique man there was no such thing as common sense; all the convictions in which one trusts are false. It was not a matter of chance that he quoted, in his Amentalist Manifesto, the following passage from The League of the Frightened Men by Rex Stout: “Words mean nothing, unless they are intended for people’s entertainment.”
Oops! I forgot to put quotation marks around that final excerpt: I hope I made it clear that the whole last paragraph is taken from the Taschen book titled Rene Magritte.
...& as long as I am typing in another text box, I'll add one more brief quote that I find apropos. The following is from section V of my friend Tristan Tzara's “Dada Manifesto of Feeble Love and Bitter Love”:
“I support all the conventions — to suppress them would be to make new ones, which would complicate our lives in a truly repugnant fashion.”
I find myself almost relieved to learn how the effects of the absinthe on even your brain turn out to be human after all (I tend to naturally believe that you have 100% pitch perfect memory!) - and pleased to see that forgetting about our previous conversation about Blood Child (only about 1½ years back?;)) had you look them up in depth - as far as it's possible with a band that doesn't really have a big online precense. However, I also feel somehow guilty for initially (though of course unintentionally) leading you down a dark path of gloomy search results!
Either way, Blood Child are one of "my" bands, in the sense that it's of of those I work with closely, and I have by long surrendered to my urge to quote and mention them as often as my brain demands! And as I said; I only fully understood their lyrical mantra (about the pure sound of words etc.) after talking to you about it sometime during the first lockdown:)
You would of course fit in perfectly as their mascot & 7th band member; after all, every great band should have their own personal genius writer & public speaker join them on stage at any performance before a live venue audience!
As for your (double-)quote “Words mean nothing, unless they are intended for people’s entertainment” I believe you just perfectly proved that point by what you said, yourself, directly above;
Though your statement "Having learned to digest not only poison but fine cuisine, I season my caviar with cyanide" indeed had me intriguingly entertained and smiling to begin with, I'm now beginning to think that you might in fact have also just encapsulated your whole personal approach to not only art in general, but also to writing..? I know I'm really taking a few liberties here, it's definitely at strech letting one sentence define your entire art perception and creative process ;P But, there we are - words "intended for people's entertainment" turn out to have tons of meaning (at least through my personal lens;)
Lastly, reading your quote from the “Dada Manifesto of Feeble Love and Bitter Love”; “I support all the conventions — to suppress them would be to make new ones, which would complicate our lives in a truly repugnant fashion”, it strikes me how that is indeed an issue I personally need to consciously face and continuously fight - in order to not simply create new conventions when suppressing old ones!
The title itself, however, almost makes me want to write my own Manifesto of Ultimate, Unconditional and Weightless Love... or, maybe I've in fact already been doing exactly that for almost a decade now, only, I've obviously done it in so innumerably many words that it's completely indecipherable to the untrained eye.
Oh I'm so embarrassed now, seriously I DID forget that we had talked about that group already — I wish I could claim that I was only PRETENDING to be ignorant, for the sake of making a few jokey observations for any readers who might stop by & skim this public comment thread, but the truth is that I was just absentminded and careless... however, let's not blame the innocent absinthe for my mental lapse: I feel that my brain is just a sieve for names & facts unless they're from my own wheelhouse (in other words, I am guilty of extreme selfishness when it comes to artistic taste! — & I'm duly ashamed of this) — even tho you've made me aware of so many of those bands belonging to shoegaze and postpunk or whatever, and I love listening to them and absorbing anything I can, it's all still quite alien to me; I'm a very slow learner; whereas my mind is a steel trap when it comes to the type of music that I grew up with: late 80s rap is my beloved first language and has the feeling of home-sweet-home. I always tell people to think of me as damaged goods when it comes to musical taste: I'm perhaps incapable of learning. (The period that ends this last sentence is actually a teardrop.)
And, yes, I agree that the remark about poison and fine cuisine does, as you say, "encapsulate [my] whole personal approach to not only art in general, but also to writing" — I'm not ashamed to "let one sentence define [my] entire art perception and creative process"; I'm happy to have struck upon a formula that sums me. It also doesn't leave me feeling bad to be so easily encapsulated, because I think the same sentence is a fitting summarization of this whole wide world.
By the way, I share with you the same relation to the Tzara quote about "supporting all conventions": it's something that I must "consciously face and continuously fight" as well.
You absolutely shouldn't feel any embarrassment whatsoever! Or, at least I myself is also super 'guilty of extreme selfishness when it comes to artistic taste' and find it hard to remember the name of more than a handfull of (supposedly) world known actors as well as almost any million-dollar top hit, no matter how extremely famous I'm told it is! Those obvious shortcomings in my knowlegde, however, doesn't bother me at all (once overcoming the initial embarrassment) whereas something that DOES bother me (sometimes to the point of desperate frustration) is my incapability to recall in detail everything that we've previuosly talked about! Meaning, down to the exact quotes, details in conversations about art, artists and (my sometimes weird) reading of your previous entries, our previous twisting of words and meanings etc etc. I'd seriously LOVE to have pitch perfect memory, at least in regards to this, though I absolutely do not have that... however, I was actually rather convinced that you did! haha;)
But seriously, HOW could you possibly remember the name of every single band and song I've mentioned over the past how-long-is-it-now... I'm only super pleased that you actually find the time and curiousity to dig into this odd niche of mine from time to time, and often even recognize their essence as being relatable in one way or another!
Also, even though you don't want to blame the innocent absinthe in this one case, I'd actually like to do just that... probably mostly because it could then be referred to as being 'absintheminded' which rings rather appealing to my ears!
For now, I on my hand can't help feeling pretty proud to have picked out and recognized your sentence ("Having learned to digest not only poison but fine cuisine, I season my caviar with cyanide") as encapsulating your personal approach to both art in general, as well as specifically to writing -- tbh I was so nervous to even claim something like that to begin with, and now feel rather relieved to learn that you actually agree!
And you're right; The sentence itself is indeed liquid enough to impose all the freedom you could possibly desire rather than any restrictions - however, at the same time it appears to me to be extremely precise!
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