thoughts

The Breathing Mountain has become a point of obsession for me. I work on it every day, and I'm finding a great deal of pleasure with both the sentences and the flow of the arguments. Something I don't typically do but am doing for this piece is hinting at my final argument through numerous vignettes. By the time the reader gets to my conclusion, they should be familiar enough with the idea of the breathing mountain that it won't be too much of a shock. This is uncharacteristically smooth, for me at least.

The scope of what I'm writing seem arrogantly large, though, and I regularly have to contend with doubts to that effect. I'm not sure that I have the authority to write about this. But, well, authority is a weird issue. Because this isn't a matter of qualifications. Or, if it is, the qualifications are not based on one's degree or career. It has a great deal more to do with the way I see the world and the practice of applying theory to perception.

My ideas are largely shaped by the people I surround myself with. Most of them are architects, and their conception of urban space and human interaction has made its way into my theories. Like them, I am also obsessed with the way people organize themselves and the types of hierarchies that develop amongst eachother. I just have an oddly spiritual take on all of it, and I wonder if that organization is itself a sort of organism. Anyway, I'm slightly drunk right now and unsure what else to write. The goal was simply to put a few words on paper.

Another important comment about these last days is my obsession with beauty. When I was in high school creative writing, I remember constantly struggling to write beautiful scenes. I wrote a great deal about autumn leaves tumbling across the ground, and about things falling, like sheets of paper drifting out of somebody's hand and floating down a cliff into the sea spray. I was obsessed with that sort of stuff. It was cinematic beauty. But I also thought a lot about sentences. I always wanted to polish the individual sentences to perfection. This often blocked me and kept from getting very far with my writing. I liked to say that I'd written thousands of opening sentences to my novel. Which, when I think about it, probably isn't that far from the truth.

I'm still obsessed with beauty, though now its more about the beauty of words than the beauty of images. I pride myself on prose that alliterate and lift the tongue. I love a line that leaves one light-headed. It has next to nothing to do with the content of the idea. It's about the way my tongue feels inside my mouth. Beauty is the way one speaks. Unfortunately, this too keeps me from progressing through paragraphs. I often spend inordinate amounts of time perfecting, pushing the "puu" sound into every word. And although many of these sentences still make sense, they don't always. And there are crisper ways I could write a sentence. So when I reread, I'm torn between keeping the beauty and revising for clarity. The beauty, anyway, just seems like a pretension. Few people will notice it anyway, unless they happen to read the piece aloud.

Still, it's something that helps me have faith in my sentence. If it sounds beautiful, I feel alright with it and can move on. I'm not sure if I'd be comfortable submitting a work that lacks this hint of poetry.