Summer Work

I am well-nigh finishing my UTRA (grant funded research). I think I have just begun my last book. Its called Everyday Creativity, and it is about creativity. Creation is a silly thing to talk about scientifically. The magnitude of difference between a philosophical voyage into creation oceans, and the drab, pinch-nosed discussion of 'expressive' writing's relationship to T-cell counts is very big. The text feels like a waste of time, through and through. It is as though I can see through the pores of the sentences, as though their skin was falling away. But not out of decay or disuse, but rather the result of superficiality - the sort of superficiality that immediately points to the lack of substance that is never there anyways, but it just seems foolish to do it like this. Suicidal superficiality.

I much prefer a thick, custard work. A monument, standing over nothing just like the rest of us, but monumental in its lack of meaning. I read the first 30 pages of Anti-Oedipus this summer and instead of digging deep to catch every thought and point and idea, I just glazed over a little bit and took it at face value. Machines are machines. Desire is desire. All the parts grew into a gigantic, ridiculous, and convoluted picture. I could not see this picture, but it was there, inside my head. A subconscious understanding that benefits me in very few ways, but pleases me when it occasionally shows it's nose.

What helps is what Jessica once told me. "They think this is the most important thing in the world, because it is real, it is the most real you can get." Which is why my paper on Reading and Writing. And Speaking was actually about those three things, about every time we do them. Similarly, the desire machines are real, they grow out and in you. The words snuggle onto the surface of the skin and become parts of the body. Now we have machines, like hairs, on our outsides. Such important work.

My work is less important. I read books by PhD's with meditation experience, or meditators with PhD experience. Ends up being quite similar. Boring academics. Jessica also told me that most academics is (are) boring. But the work of the therapist is important, that is what bugs me. Bugs the heck out of me. If therapy is such an important thing, why are the soft thinkers involved with it so uninspiring? The answer, I believe, is that therapy is not about thinking, and as Jessica also says, don't mix your interests. Jonathan, don't study hip hop in a critical thinking setting. Therapy is about being and being with and healing, all of which are not intellectual but intuitive (see Bergson, The Creative Mind). I often ask myself which goes higher. Bergson claims that the two - intellect and intuition - are exactly equal, or at least that their perfect realizations would be. I have no such strong conviction. At least I got to read that book, and hopefully will slide it in to an otherwise confused course.