• Meditating, Creating, & Fetching.

    Writing Aside #20.
    Bella & MillyI like the idea of meditating in the morning. In fact, I did it every day for about 20 years. For some people, it’s a gentle way to make the transition from the chaos of dreams to the illusion of structure. But, for me, it’s like telling a dog that just woke up to lie down again. Got to let that puppy out to run around for a while.
        After one hit of caffeine and a distracted look out the window, the ideas start bubbling up. To try to let them go or tamp them down—what Plato called creatus interruptus—seems not only like an exercise in futility, but oddly unnatural.
        Often, it’s just a phrase or sentence that rises to the surface. Occasionally, it’s a big-time holographic vision that can take months to elaborate.
        When I was younger, I’d try to keep my legs crossed and mind relatively still, while quietly sending those thoughts off into a kind of mnemonic holding tank. But now, if I don’t catch them while they’re flying by, I’ll never remember them. Or, more importantly, why the hell I thought they were so brilliant in the first place. Which, often, they’re not.
        Eventually, my mind stops on its own to take a breather. Like a dog who, after relentlessly chasing a tennis ball or frisbee for half-hour or so, is panting so hard its gullet is hanging out. She may act like she wants more, but is actually quite content to collapse at your feet.
        In the same way, after spending a while calmly drinking coffee and frenetically chasing ideas, my mind is actually quite content to collapse at my feet.
        That would be a good time to meditate. Of course, I have been all along.

    (With thanks to Bella & Milly.)

    Dec
    08
    2010
  1. somestrangeseahorse reblogged this from davidblistein
  2. davidblistein posted this

Powered by Tumblr | Crystalline designed by Sonny T.

Dave, Inc.

I'm currently working on several writing projects. (We used to call writing projects "books," but it's not that clear these days.)

Real Time started ten years ago when historical characters began appearing in the midst of my everyday life and giving me a piece of their minds. Book 1 is finished. Book 2 is drafted. And Book 3 is rolling around in my imagination. We're about to publish a monograph with several selections from the book, along with an original essay by documentary filmmaker Ken Burns.

The Secret Life of Carrots, which is written by the God of Carrots (of all "people") slices and dices its way through conventional human perspectives on everything from life underground and nutrition to stem-cell research and reincarnation.

David's Inferno is a look back at my two-year experience of depression + dysphoric-mania between 2005 and 2007. It's neither manic nor dysphoric…and usually not depressing either. In fact, some posts are are actually kind of amusing. It's inspired by William Styron's brilliant Darkness Visible.

I'm also writing The Power of Not Now in which a dying man “confesses” that he is the Buddha and proceeds to gleefully and irreverently deconstruct the author’s assumptions about relationships, war, spirituality, and more.

Mad Liberation is about a young woman who struggles to understand the fundamental stories we all share—about money, relationship, morality, etc.—and how we could start telling new ones.

And there are these Writing Asides, about all the things that writers do and/or think about when they "should" be writing.


Creative Commons License
Writing Asides by David Blistein is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.davidblistein.com.
SOCIAL NETWORKS EXTRAS