Letter from Afield
Life starts and your brain turns ON. The question is does it run any differently than the other one zillion brains in the universe. I don’t know. Perhaps brain imaging will provide the answer. But in the meantime, I could offer my brain as an open exhibit and have the reader judge. The question being raised runs the line from am I crazy to am I sane. My initial feeling is that I am sane. Jack Kerouac may have had something similar in mind for his automatic writing is very similar to this undertaking. Writing is something that has always fascinated me and seemed to hold a mystical/mythical place in my life. But amazingly, this interest yielded very few results. Why? Probabbly because it was too important, too powerful. Structures were set up. But isn’t writing just moving your mind to page. I had never thought that. My feeling was that writing had to be difficult, had to have structure. The result: nothing. Too much was in the way. So now as death approaches (not literally), one has to acknowledge that nothing will happen if the present course is followed. A new course must ensue. The new course is just to open the brain and let it spill. Will it be of any value? Well, at least it will have potential, because it will exist. Will it be real?? This is unknown. Will it have punctuation or paragraphs?
YES.
What runs thru my brain is a constant chatter of thoughts/concepts/opinions that are in my head like conversation but just stay there percolating, circling around the neurons and ending up nowhere. Although, of course, some are actually liberated by conversation. So why not write a diary. Is this a diary?? Hmm. I guess the only difference is that a diary generally stays in a secret place while this is going to be out there in the virtual ether: intended for pubic consumption rather than just a personal accounting. This thing, this “letter from afield” is also intended to be much more than a mundane diary of sights and sounds. And this is why the writing has been bottled up, because the intent is so grandiose. See, this is supposed to be IMPORTANT and even transcendant. Not just about the Cheerios you ate for breakfast, but the meaning of Cheerios. (wow).
