Rejected Writing

I submitted a piece on "The Tao of #Occupy" to the Huffington Post a week and a half ago. Never heard back from them. Two days ago, this article came out: Occupy Buddha, by a Buddhist writer and teacher, Lewis Richmond.

A very cute piece, though kind of platitudinal and obvious for my taste. Personally - and I don't mean this arrogantly at all - I thought mine was better.

What sucks about the writing business is that so often they look at your bio before your work. If you don't have a number of impressive publications under your belt already, you can get left in the dust. I have spent my entire life writing and publishing. I had a book of poetry published before I even graduated college. I earn almost no money from my work, even though I spend more than 40 hours a week at it. Sometimes I get frustrated when I get passed over again and again because my personality is not exotic or charismatic enough. I get frustrated when I read interviews with editors and publishers who freely admit that they look for authors with personalities that will sell before they even bother to look at the quality of their work. My writing is good. It's complex, thorough, sometimes meandering, sometimes (I hope) challenging. I strive to avoid platitudes. We have enough of those. I try to write things that really challenge and push my own limits of knowledge, instead of only writing about simple, easy topics that I've already mastered. I figure that if I challenge myself, others will find my work challenging and valuable; if I write only what I already know, then I won't grow and neither will my readers.

Sometimes, I wish my work could be judged on its own merits, instead of dismissed because I'm not somebody the world thinks is important. Sometimes I get so frustrated at gatekeepers who handle their role irresponsibly, chasing profits or popularity instead of quality writing. I get especially frustrated at gatekeepers who pretend that they aren't gatekeepers, who show favoritism for individuals they find attractive or charismatic but get huffy and offended at the suggestion that their own bias might preclude better, more intelligent writing.

Most of all, I get frustrated at how no one seems to be saying anything new. Maybe that's what happens in the Information Age. When everything's been said, than the only people who get attention for saying it are the ones who can say it flashy, with jazz hands and a halo of pop culture enlightenment.

Maybe this is just Saturn Return stuff. I sometimes think that my confrontation with authority will take the form of a confrontation with the Rule of Immaturity. Stepkids, manipulative ex's, and a society that looks more and more like Brave New World even with the best of intensions.

Maybe I should just publish a book, no matter how shitty, if all anyone looks at is the cover.

Notes from "Disturbing Gentleness" by Timothy Morton

A fantastic talk about ontological nonviolence and its ties to Buddhism. The .mp3 plus PowerPoint slides are available here.

- no primordial substance or ultimate being, no world or environment as middle object

- existence is anarchy, reality is "deeply pointless"

- "It's not simply that nonviolence is a good idea. Nonviolence is existence. Existence is nonviolence."

- irreducible rift between essence and appearance - radical and fundamental - a thing IS self-contradiction

- past is appearance, essence is future, past and future coincide (?) without touching one another, like two beams of light interpenetrating - present is an illusion

- "being in the now" is a kind of materialism - what's meant by this meditative now-ness is a deep awareness of the rift - no such thing as "empty space"

- "What is the difference between a duck? One of its legs are both the same."

- thinking can become brittle with too rigorous metalanguage, rigid consistency - should be like a willow, accept that some contradictions are true

- much of philosophy is an intellectual defense against the threatening intimacy of things

- alien (nonhuman) phenomenology - "Things can dream one another because they are always already not themselves. Not even the thing itself can objectify itself."

- "Causality happens because of a dance of nonidentity taking place on the ontological inside of a thing."

- I v. me

- movement -> P and not-P

- movement is not something a thing does occasionally, motion is a deep ontological x (10:30ish) of a thing; motion arises from a rift between I and me

- Kant's discovery about human beings - that part of their nature is sealed from imperical access - is also true of objects

- hidden property of any entity - something in the beautiful experience is hidden, this unique thing is the beauty

- experience of beauty is essential part of democracy

- Kantian theory of beauty presupposes a being that can be wounded by colors, sounds, smells, textures, tastes, affected by them - attuning process of beauty can commence - (not mere appetite)

- "aesthetic distance" is misnomer for a non-conceptual aesthetic intimacy - aesthetic distance is not between a thing and another object, but lies within the thing itself

- why trauma is traumatic - it strips the world bare of the illusion that it isn't an illusion (15:45ish)

- things are co-existence in their being, interlinked, enmeshed

- "There very attempt to tear myself away enmeshes me further. Conscious co-existence with the mesh involves a form of nonviolence."

- the beauty experience in me shows that I am not my ego, the beauty experience proves to me that there are others

- experience of beauty - suddenly losing a sense of boundary, resonance with the other (opera singer and wine glass)

- "The knife of beauty is able to insert itself into the slit between an objects essence and appearance."

- death - shatters like a vase and the space inside the vase merges with the space outside it

- "Beauty is a nonviolent experience of near-death, a warning that one is fragile like everything else in the universe."

- thinking needs to risk its sanity a bit, put itself in some danger

- "The inner fragility of a thing is why a thing can exist at all."

- "Things are the rubble of other things. Nonviolence means to co-exist nonviolently with this rubble, to let the rubble be rubble rather than trying to build a nice smooth golf-course over it." - "A reduction of an object to its appearance is a reduction of an object to consistency. An object is internally riven, it is fundamentally inconsistent. Thus the imposition of consistency is simply violence on the most profound level at which violence can manifest. Nonviolence, at this level of being, is allowing an object to remain inconsistent."

- "What the #Occupy movements get right is that sheer coexistence of people, not an agenda - the media are hungry for a topic, but the #Occupy movements have simply transcended this demand - this sheer coexistence is a very powerful thing. Why? Because it is a living symbol of coexisting with coexistence as such, in all its inconsistency and fragility."

- meditation - a commitment to non-adjustment, allowing things to remain as they are, inconsistent

- "Humans must get used to the depth of nonviolence in their being." -> meditation, contemplation