Writing is foreign and yet familiar. It is consciousness articulated, or expressed...so why does a previously unread text present itself as something new and unfamiliar? Text maintains and carries within it the structure of our interior consciousness, and it seems new because our implicit consciousness is not self-expressing. Spiritual leaders speak of prayer as a silent discovery. Writing is a sort of reminder. A nudge. Don't forget this, it says. but the help held behind and within this text originates from within the mind - both the reader's and the writer's. It pulls us into something we have forgotten. It reminds us not always of a fact or truth, but rather the space that we must navigate in order to find this truth. There is no replacement for contemplation, and without it any two people could extract seemingly contradictory notions or ideas. The text re-presents the tasks of meaning-making. The text outlines the truth that needs to be discovered. The conscientious writer is motivated not by a truth he must spread, nor a message to be told. The writer's work is to show us to think of things we may otherwise forget to consider. No text holds an absolute truth, and neither does any mind. When the writer discovers something of significance amidst his own thoughts, he calls upon the reader to discover it for herself. The conscientious writer is humbled not merely by the impossibility of containing or sharing a truth. The writer's burden is that his words are significant only insofar as they can push the reader into the same or similar space within the world of meaning. No text is self-sufficient to replace meaning, just as the writer's mind is not sufficient for all or any of mankind. Both are but a mirror-glance reminding us to look back into that silence and see for ourselves.

Stories and Telling

We all know at least a few storytellers. Some recount their achievements so as to brag. Some share others' stories to inspire. The more people talk, the more data we have to judge with. We don't necessarily judge in the negative personal sense; stories show us the differences between the facts and the meaning they hold for different people. Some of us people-watchers think the plot is just something to entertain or bring meaning to our leisure. Stories, and particularly storytelling, shows us much more about ourselves as people than it does as individuals. What is identity? Why can stories unite us, and which divide? The act of storytelling seems just as important to our daily life as the things that we use them to remember. We focus on the events because stories are meant to focus on upon events. Stories flow from our need to place meaning and events into our private consciousness no less than they do into a social context. Whether discussing different mythologies or religions in terms of the archetypes and trends, or to extrapolate the factors that determine a myth's success - these analytic constructs are themselves a sort of story. A writer can't approach his project until he admits that even his consideration of the writing process are stories, be they potential or actual. My attempting to comment on the writing process itself reminds me that I am a storyteller not only while writing a new story, but evaluating potential stories. I am positioned in time and flow through it such that I must justify the flow of facts and give hierarchy to different values, even if only to ground my experiencing consciousness. Eventually the thinker realizees that his life isn't just influenced by facts and flow, but is itself a story to be told - even prior to the end of our lives, or the awakening of our consciousness. Stories don't just reveal our inherent structure, they manifest our nature, in its changeability as well as its steadfast value. After making this observation, the relevant writer neither begins nor abandons his full effort. He is, was and always will be overflowing of self-revealing consciousness. No words describe his project, and yet his drive is more real to him than his previous influences. The only originality possible can therefore be no less than a response to and expression of his relationship to all other consciousness and potential. He is fooled before he thinks, knows before he notices, and becomes only when his imminent confusion questions his own potential. The story is not just an answer to our need for meaning, it is our expression of the manifold of questions. The falsity and emptiness of our stories' conclusions remind us to continue in the hopes that one may account for the endlessness of our pursuit.

Death and Value Lost - Steve Jobs

The world lost a very influential person today. Apple CEO Steve Jobs passed away leaving much mourning to come. I wonder why and how we mourn, and don't understand why another's global influence makes them worthy of greater morning.
My friends and readers mention that my opening post was too dense, so I will be unpacking it over other posts.
For now I must focus on current events.
Our actions always point to the value of the objects and subjects involved. We must not mourn Mr Jobs any more than we mourn other death...though many of my iproduct consumer friends will ignore me.
I am not insensitive. I simply note that the value that we find in a person often varies depending on their influence, and it should not. I don't care for Apple products, have never met the man in question, and his person or actions have no direct influence on me.
I am neither inclined, nor persuaded to be emotional.
When we focus on productivity instead of potential and all other things that people have in common, we distract from the purpose of mourning.
Death of another reminds us of our own death, but only insofar as that other personally touched us. We can all come together to mourn someone, and here we aren't really mourning that person more qualitatively more, but rather quantitatively. In my disposition, I cannot cry at every global death, so I must not cry for Steve Jobs', if only for respect of all other deaths I do not mourn. Even tragedies where many people die suddenly, I cannot muster feelings here. Such is life, such is death. We all live, and we all die. Surely someone who adds value to our lives will me mourned more intently, but they are no more worthy of mourning.
Death and the emotions with which we bear it remind us how imperfect we are in our true feelings.
Let's hope we have time to correct our disrespect in time to mourn each other's deaths accordingly.

Relevance

This blog will witness to the thought process of a contemporary attempt at relevant, significant and substantial literature. This blog will be less so a defined message than a list of themed musings. Relevancy weighs like the burden of proof. It must make its final assertion clear, while making it evident. In formal writing proof entails supporting a thesis with defensible premises and logically rigorous arguments. In literature, relevance requires a central sentiment, theme or message. Lasting literature speaks to the permanence of human longing and affect - our roots and effects. Specific details of a story always form analogies in the minds of readers. An artful writer does more than combine, contrast and compare values. She does so with such complexity and articulationthat multiple broad analogies can together amount to much simpler ones. But which truths last in the minds of readers? Where can the writer find a worthy theme? The tension that will last long as our species, and perhaps onward, is freedom.

The audience freely draws conclusions about their literature just as it does in its sociopolitical and personal fronts. At a political level, some notion of liberty or freedom is central to the most pacifist of human rights movements, and even the most violent protests. Peoples and individuals alike wish for both the freedom to define and discover their own values and the power to impose their values upon others. The balance between defensive and offensive value-pursuit is not immediately clear, and any writer wishing to discuss freedom with any candidness must accommodate for some measure of ambiguity. The writer colours and articulates value through text just as the life of groups and individuals pursues and implements value through their life. The writer's choice is in this way one with the individual and social context of individuals, societies and cultures for whom she writes. The mindful writer must not only find herself in her text, but reveal her affect in what goes unsaid. Persuasion depends on articulating a message and distracting from all thoughts that may conflict. The writer does not tell of another's conflict. The writer does not recall her own past, present or future conflicts. The writer, and the writing, is the conflict. Problem and solution, freedom and determination, conception and destruction - these don't lie in the writer for the text to project. The apparent projection is really neither consequence nor cause of value. Writer, audience, individual and whole all just are. The act, thought, context and audience of a text are themselves manifestations and the text  itself must be so as well.