To Learn

It occurs to me now, eons too late, having read a thousand tired internet blog posts, that affectations are a waste of time to both reader and writer when the writer's purpose is not aesthetic.  This tired nature is contagious to us; affectations are memes.

When one is writing with aesthetic intentions, affectations can be used in creative ways, most, exactly once, and with limited replay value.  If there is a literary equivalent to picking up pennies in front of a steamroller, this is it.  Sooner or later, your reader is flattened into a disinterested pancake, complete with googled eyeballs.

If there is a lesson, it may be that the purposes of writing are better facilitated by eliminating - always and everywhere - the use of affectations.  Try to write only the truth, and eliminate everything, everything, everything else.

Can a meme be the truth?  Yes, in its own, localized place, it is as real as anything else.  A meme is the active, infected mind that conceives it, and likewise the vulnerable mind that receives it, and the medium traveled, and the past and future.  But it is not the feelings it simulates.

It took me a terribly long time, too, to realize that great writing evokes feeling precisely by avoiding memes.  Perhaps that told me the true nature of memes - that they are all that we already know.  Nothing more, nothing less.  Writing that evades memes teaches us - neurologically, it teaches us - and at that level, to teach and to change cannot be divorced.  They are the same mechanism.

If I have spent my life until now tilting towards information and objectivity, then I wish to spend the rest of it tilting towards art and aesthetics and subjective truth.  I have never believed that a person is too old to change, so long as they carry with them an awareness, a paranoia - or better yet, a superstition - that their own vibrant and changing consciousness will some day wither away.