division, diligence, depiction

(video: Hip-hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes)

A turbid mixture of plodding along and patiently counting days. Writing the date at the top of the ledger more solemnly on some pages, more frenzied on others. The transilient nature of time spent here like living as nine different people who all hate and love different things. Not multiple personalities, no sharp divides between them, but a haze of cognitive dissonance blurring the edges between each proclivity. To live in some idealized state of Renaissance-personhood, we've got to be able to deactivate whole sectors of our brains, illuminate others that have hibernated and cranked out preconscious reckoning while we've done that other thing. We've got to snuff out the celebration in us to wake up with the alarm clock, and we've got slip into the absurd as we head back home, and we've got to try and enjoy art without destroying it with examination and yet we've got to look at it's pieces if we want anything from it. We've got to revel, rebel, dissimilate . . .in the space between sleep and compensation and capitulation. The only strategy I have is to live in dreams (not ambitions or hopes, but the narrative mess of your sleeping mind), hold onto the strata while you amble through a day. And to figure out just how much banality you can tolerate, and allow for no more. And to occasionally lose yourself in modernizations of old rituals.

The most interesting class, if not ultimately the most beneficial to my academic goals, that I have ever had is going on now. Linguistics this consilient merger of psychology and science and anthropology and human ecology and creation and sociology. I apparently have some latent skill for it, though I don't know whether it is objective or a product of my enthusiasm. The approach is one I talked to myself about in High School listening to english teachers prattle on prescriptively and obsolescent. This language is whatever we say it is. This language is whatever works. A rule that does not help me express myself more clearly or more efficiently or more deeply, is a fetter to be broken.

This won't be news to anyone. But in writing third-person, there is a further categorization of style. There are terms for these, but I don't care what they are: "Transient" delves to some degree into minds of multiple characters and depicts events from somewhere within their perspective, blurring the identification of a singular protagonist and allowing for intrigue, complication, multi-threading. The depiction may be omniscient, but not necessarily. Think Dune. "Focalized" sits the camera within the observational powers of one character as they experience the story. It allows for a high-degree of internalization and runs the mental life of a character in parallel with their actual life. "Objective" is like a play acted. Things simply happen, a protagonist may be identified by how much time they get on the page, or how the reader's response to the character has been manipulated. This approach does not carry with it internalizations. Anyway . . I said all that to say this: I'm trying to write something "Objective". It simultaneously strips literature of one of its great attributes (the ability to illuminate individual perspective) and forces a different interaction with the reader. I can't say anything to devalue any of the three approaches, but there is something timeless (and not neccessarily speaking of a piece's ability to be read across generations, but to exist in a past/futureless void) about this depiction. As though everything is happening in that microsecond before response and reaction, before the concrete becomes the abstract. And yet, the entire thing is entirely made up of its construction; by that I mean, it asymptotically approaches "being what it is". I don't know how to explain that any better.