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[W r i t e r' s N o t e b o o k] The writer doesn't choose sides. He is thankful that there is a stubborn insistent core remaining to prevent a vast killing from taking place. The writer often, like an idiot, allows all the events, images, personalities to crash through into his mind, replacing his own sense of self. It puts him into bad situations from time to time. What the writer needs are a few simple actions. It doesn't matter how honorable the writer thinks he is, he has to pay attention to the present. He reads, he thinks, he thinks of all the energy taken up by these activities and then ponders on the present. What exists in the present that either inspires him or draws him out or makes him want to get acquainted with? He doesn't tolerate the wrong kind of hatreds. To have, that is, general hatreds for all kinds of reasons. That creates, no doubt, a drain in the mind. It bleeds a few strengths. The hatreds belong in the lower order that still struggles with primitive conflicts. And yet on the first glance: hate, fear, stupidity, and greed! The papers and TV news show humanity crazed. The hatred has an ineluctable draw toward the weakness in one's nature. A witness to both the birth of a child and of a soul, experiences a violent and wild affair. Perhaps what is destroyed is a fabrication of innocence. That sort of innocence, at any rate, that does not understand that, already, it has many adversary's. The soul understands adversary's. It strives toward conciliation, toward "wholeness" but not at its birth. At its birth it understands there are forces that would destroy it and so it takes on the face of a grotesque mask. Of course, if it stops there it is hypnotized and petrified by its adversary. Pessimism can become a dance of the literal around the budding spirit. A ritual. One can nearly predict what will happen to a particular individual simply by listening to him or her talk for a moment or two. Pessimism has its own peculiar forms. There is a naked form of it that can destroy the humanity of a person and regress him to an animal state. The most horrifying thing witnessed by the young writer was seeing so much pessimism sweep through his fellow writers and carry them off to the dim rooms of nothingness. If the writing soul can't find its way to health and optimism then the culture is dead. Thinking and creating are ballast's against the pressures. These become the salvation against a world that strives to be free but which destroys it at every step. In the early 30's authentic ambitions appeared. Youth, in my particular case, was highly critical of ambition since ambition had led to utter destruction of the world, apparently. At least, between a perceived utopia and the real world were the ambitious schemes of millions of people. Thus, youth scorned ambition and its baubles. This was right and proper under the circumstance since it was necessary to find the true nature of the world between idea and reality. The exercise of normal ambition became a slap in the face of the future. Yet, the future is reached through profound ambition! So, the first dilemma to meet youth is what to do with its ambitions. David Eide eide491@earthlink.net © 2002 David Eide. All rights reserved. |