Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Listlessness and Productivity

The speed of my own life has slowed considerably in the last several weeks. Moments seem to drag on and on, and though one would think that this would be a blessing for my own productivity, instead this slowness stalls any actual creative thought - except, of course, thinking about slowness. Months ago, life zoomed along; now, activity has petered off and left me with a lot of time to myself. Last post I mentioned that I had a new ritual that catalyzed my "productivity;" this ritual is important because it breaks my own consciousness of the slowness and opens me up into my active environment. Perhaps I am addicted to the milieu. One fantasizes about being a hermit in the woods, alone with his books. If I found myself alone with my books, I don't know if I could ever read a single one of them.

Books, or ideas in general, represent a matrix of dialectical relationships: perhaps we have unlimited time to ponder an idea, but what makes that idea most interesting is the affect it has on the world as it emerges from writing or speech or whatever expression. Nothing is stagnant; beauty is uncontainable; brilliance - epiphany - is an idea affecting the entire body at immense speed.

But if we take a good idea as an experience of speed, "something with which I am concerned," then we must also address the syndrome of our modern age: anxiety, or the experience of the accident of an idea in the function of speed. Defining the accident as the de-realization of an object's reality, anxiety shatters an idea into different sites of thought. Some of these become compounded ideas that are troublesome or confusing, making such ideas difficult to tease out while simultaneously rendering anxiety a difficult thing to transcend. Sometimes, in slowness, anxiety can become the overwhelming feature of time -- paranoia, hyperawareness, helplessness.

By containing speed -- not allowing it to dominate our lives -- we can inspire the moments of brilliance that we strive for so much. Too much too soon gets one caught up in the wheel; bit by bit, we must reveal ourselves to the world and the world to us.

Thursday, January 10, 2008

New Rituals

I have begun a routine in which I insist that I do something intellectually productive every day. This ends up playing out as a trip to a coffeeshop and a couple of hours of reading and writing. I leave my house because it forces me to interact with the world and the movement itself is a good primer for casual reading. The location is usually a coffeeshop because the caffeine is vaguely inspiring. Coffeeshops are also public places and I like to see and be seen, like any other modern person.

This ritual is a centering practice: it reminds me that there are ideas that I care about in the world and that they are worth exploring.


Some blurry images from my life: