Friday, April 15, 2005

 

Publishing

Always have been somewhat taken by the idea that so many people feel so driven to share such intimate things...as a younger man, I remember being approached on an extremely regular basis by real street freaks...the list of names is crazy long...Screwy Louie, Red, the Bead Lady, much in New Orleans...and of course just the regular, run-of-the-mill encounter in pubs, in libraries, public transport, those odd little encounters when you suddenly find a total stranger telling you things you cannot imagine telling anyone, even after years of familiarity with another person. Poetry I guess is one means of doing that and keeping yourself safe behind the conventions of art...though that, too, comes with risks. I remember at one point being so puzzled by this willingness, so regularly encountered in my life, on the part of strangers, to approach me in particular, that I felt compelled to explore the issue with my wife, who gets less of it, and who is much more likely to walk away from such an encounter. She put it simply: 'It's because you listen.'

The net's added a whole new dimension to this, of course, with online journals, but also with those sites I come across that are oddly poignant to me, and clearly to others as well. A while back I posted a link to Found magazine (yeah I know, sooo last week, but I haven't moved into hyperspeed yet and don't imagine I ever will, really)--but this morning, starting this last day of work on Triplopia, I encounter this blog, launched the first of this year of our Lord 2005, and once again found myself drawn into the wonder of the secret lives all around us.

I dunno. I prolly ought to take some time to really sit down and write what I feel when I see this sort of thing--the only thing is, I usually feel like once I do that, I'm never gonna stop, it's just that complex. Far beyond simple voyeurism (and I do have to admit to a very strong streak of that in myself as well...), more a matter of really being centered in what is apparently a need, comparable to eating, among humans, to let themselves be known to others...to communicate...and how often this is stifled or staunched, either by our social structures or by the language itself (arguably, I suppose, one of those social structures)--as you can see, this gets complex, and quickly, and I suspect that even a fully fleshed out oeuvre of works taking up an entire library shelf would not exhaust the subject for me.

So...

On the physical front, blood work done this week, first time in about 2 decades and the major source of anxiety for me, came out clean, so I'm a lot more settled about that. I go in for surgery a week from this coming Monday, but it's a minor operation, and will probably settle a lot of abdominal pain I've been feeling for quite some time. Good, good. I understand I may even have a copy of Dark Nature: A Natural History of Evil to keep me company. Between that and the complete Brothers Grimm, I should manage to keep my head busy.

Okay, me out, back again at a later day...tchitch

Comments:
Thanks, Tone. It's a minor one, and I've good reason to believe they've managed to improve medical science since I last went under the knife--in fact, I don't even know that they'll be using a knife, do I? Crazy, that...in any case, reading material most heartily welcomed from all, as I understand I'll have about a week off my feet, 2 of them in hospital--and I don't like television or staring at blank walls...and I don't like German television even more.

German health care, now, we can talk...because I'm not sure I'd be in the right financial strata, in the US, to be getting this procedure done. Lucky me. I know at least one friend who wants a full report on how the machine works here...and I kinda figured learning exactly that would be the upside of the whole operation.

Any case, thanks for the good wishes.
 
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