“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Saturday, January 1, 2011

Writing, writing, writing

Writing books is intrinsically hard. It's just a lot of work. It's wonderful but you have to have a wide view. Once you start coning down to deal with separate sections that need extra citations and detail, you can lose track of the big picture. I've learned over the years to recognize that feeling and not freak about it. But it's still quite intense. Like driving through that tunnel in Switzerland—or the one from Lhasa airport to the highway by the Yellow River. It just goes on, and on, and on.

Thank goodness we have bodies. We can exercise and move and get the energy flowing out of our heads, where it settles into a gray fog if you're not careful. If Buddhism is correct and we have an after-death state such as the bardo, I'm not looking forward to the fact that it's disembodied.

3 comments:

captain furious said...

I hate to say it but in some ways this post is something of a relief to me. I read this and a couple of other blogs and am amazed at how unstoppable everyone seems when it comes to writing. Thought I was doing something wrong (I likely am in all kinds of other ways).

Anonymous said...

I agree with you, Captain Furious. Writing, even getting the space to sit and think, seems unimaginably luxurious, way beyond the grind of survival demanded by poverty - relative poverty - living hand to mouth, rural isolation, kids demanding what everyone else in the area has... struggling to find ways of making the kids see that respect towards one another and the world requires thinking. Trying to get my own brain to think of things for the kids to do which do not involve money. All taking me away from thinking about how to shift attitudes to the non-human.

Anonymous said...

I agree, Captain. Relative poverty, thinking of how to get the kids to think, hand to mouth time-consuming existence eating up the leisure required, attempting to find a quiet space when crammed together, and struggling with the cold. Writing, even thinking of how to express what biocentrism might mean, in this chaotic mess with all my mistakes slapping me in the face, is hard.