The Ambitions
There is some good thinkings going on in these posts:
The issue isn’t with revolution or change itself. But moving beyond the “single angry male revolutionist” or the “small cadre of brave revolutionists” model — to realize that the whole field is always changing and swirling, inevitably by itself — that the field is itself responsible for it, power playing over the host of cultural actors who make up that field — and that attributing its causality and origin in a few people who are jumping up and down pretending to be those responsible for it and who wish to declare their group as the drivers of revolution or change that is multicausal — is kinda not productive.
My point is that it seems finally necessary perhaps to cease thinking via the nominally supplied terms that a whole tradition encourages — that of, in this case, the idea of the “first or fresh beginning,” a myth associated with some, usually male, “creator shaman badboy” [never much fun at cons --ed.] types. All of which is so very very high school.
And on a semi-related, personal note (though something of a disconjecture):
Most of us have bad days, and at times they can string together like black Christmas lights. At times we try to extricate the writerly persona from the daily ups and downs, though it’s difficult, because so much of the self-identity is tied to one’s life work. When is a lawyer not a lawyer? When is a mechanic not a mechanic? For the longest time, I was genuinely surprised when I would make a friend who wasn’t particularly interested one way or another that I wrote; that I had almost tricked him or her — what else was there for that person to go on? Didn’t he or she know the extent of the “vocation,” that it colored every aspect of my being?
That is a sad but true story! But, perhaps, understandable considering how much writing, in my adolescence, was both fortress from the “bad shit” and the open gates that allowed the world to flood through for me. And it’s still sometimes necessary in this fashion. But more and more, the disentangling of the self-identity from the writing, so that they can both live and breathe on their own terms, is one of my ongoing projects. One of the top 3 projects for sure. And it might have seemed paradoxical to my younger self, but I think it’s helped me become a better writer as well.
