Trying to work up the courage to talk to people is difficult at the best of times, but especially when you don’t know how to approach someone. I will try to express myself the best I can in the artform that comes most natural to me, which seems to be writing this prose stream-of-conscious. When I write I find words just come tumbling out in a way they never used to. It’s as if I think with my fingertips. I was told I talk best when I read something I wrote in advance because when I try to talk it comes out confused and I hesitate in my language, and ideas don’t flow from one to another like when I write. I read a lot in the past 10 years, and really this did become like an addiction for me: to read. Reading is a form of writing because you are taking the language and syntax of other people and applying it to your own thoughts it a way that provides scaffolding for more complex thoughts to emerge. I also begun to pay attention to the Nobel Prize for literature and would read the recent prize winners because their writing is the cutting-edge in developments of style. They often won awards for writing they did over their whole career. As is often the case with writers, the writing of the past is the good stuff, but it is only in the present that we can experience them. I need to motivate myself to write; I always feel like I should publish, but really it is the act of writing that is more important to me; to create a body of work. I have avenues to put my writing infront of a small audience and maybe that is enough for me right now, I don’t need fame, although that is a thing I secretly desire, it might not be the nectar that will be as sweet as I imagine. I will just create in the meantime because the act of creation is the hard part. When you have something good, people will want to read it more when they see it. I don’t want to toil in obscurity forever, just I would like to write my mind into being. I feel nervous about putting work in front of people but just sending it on a personal website makes me feel like I can publish something to someone even if it is just a handful of people. Sometimes words come out it a torrent, and other times it is just me saying the same thing over again, either way having said the words, I feel better because I can turn my neuroses into hope eventually as I can write the emotions I want to feel. The world often feels hopeless, but that is a lie we tell ourselves, because while things are bad and in many ways getting worse, we still have the ability to create art and experience the highs of intellectual life and in many ways recently there is a silent literary revolution. While some people are reading less, there are others rediscovering the ideas of the old masters, and publishers have been about to print classics on a scale we haven’t seen before, because while there have been many superficial trending in books, many people have found classics and I have found friends who read similar books to myself, because I don’t often feel embarrassed to talk about literature to my friends even if they don’t listen; the suggestion of reading is often enough to course-correct people into the idea of reading and really that’s that it is about: the gentle art of advertising. One of my friends was surprised to see the visual language of books had changed and that was something I was aware of, but because I see books in the store so often I didn’t see the gradual change in language as starkly as my friend, although its true: books have changed, just as people change and ideas and climate change. Learning another language expands the mind as much as good books do, just it is difficult to learn a language and especially to follow up with using that language to explore a different culture, because, although it is difficult for native English speakers to imagine, there are many, many cultures in the world that see the world with eyes that we don’t see. A second language allows for you to peak behind the blinds into that different culture as not merely a tourist, but with some-kind of idea of the shape of that culture, even though you might always be an outsider, that is fine too, because you don’t have to be integrated to gain some kind of cultural perspective. People want to tell you about their culture if you let them, even if they don’t let you inside, they still want you to have some empathy for their way of being. People don’t have to be right or wrong either, just we need to have some kind of baseline for human empathy, and why does empathy have to just extend to humans? Couldn’t we have empathy for the natural world too? Once we extend our thinking beyond the scope of ourselves, we learn that all of reality is connected then isn’t everything in existence worthy of empathy, and what is beyond that in a cosmic sense? Where are the outer limits of the Cosmos? and if things are too distant are they relevant, as in if something is outside of range for light to travel to meet us, are they outside of the scope of my reality, as in, does that mean I live in a giant blackhole where anything outside of the scope of he is fundamentally too far away to be interacted with on a fundamental level? Does this mean I will forever be outside of the scope of you unable to reach in the way that the painting in the Sistine Chaple Michealangelo painted. Are you forever out of reach? Who even are you? Who am I talking to? Sometimes I just want to go to bed and sleep because that would be easier than contemplating big thoughts such as these. Anata wa dare desu ka? I write these thoughts out as they come to me, and we’ll see if they go anywhere, because what am I really saying? Nothing really. I find self-doubt plagues me when I begin to write as I struggle to see how anyone else perceives these words. I find my I and You are constantly shifting. I am I, but also my sense of self and identity shifts over time and this person saying I often feels alien to me after I read back these words after time has past and the me that was saying these words is no longer me. The same for You, both in the sense that your identity shifts over time, but also in a sense that you who I’m addressing this to is different each time as you in our language is secretly a pluralistic word, because you can mean one person or it can mean many people. In many ways it is more honest with reality that you are addressing multiple people unless I am in a room with only you and then it can’t mean anyone else but you. In this document, it is an open letter to you. Anyone can read this and, in that sense, it can be for anyone, and I …
I am bringing this piece to a close, as I can ramble on and not get anywhere, but maybe revealing some of the inner workings of my mind. In this moment I feel the rush of endorphins of talking directly to someone, and that person is myself. We really are just looking in a mirror gallery at ourselves, and they are just looking back at us. I want a smooth conclusion to this and the words wash over me constantly flowing from one word to the next like the river of time.