Getting Started.
Mar. 12th, 2009 02:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
matt_doyleI've stopped reading my old friendslist. I've stopped logging in to my old journal. I'm not actually done there yet; before finalizing this move I have to finish typing and posting the rough draft of my first novel over there. Already, though, I'm thinking differently about what and how I read, or post, or comment. I have friends who have switched or renamed blogs half a dozen times in the eight years since I came to LJ, but this is a first for me. I felt that I needed to construct a different headspace in which to interact with the Internet (or at least, the blogosphere), and I was right.
In part, it's a question of priorities. A lot of the posts on my old journal were friendslocked, filtered, or privatized, because they were talking about things I didn't want to share with everyone. My old journal was an intimate personal space. This journal is more of a cubicle, or a roll-top desk. There may be the occasional extraneous newspaper clipping or family photo giving insight into who I am and what I'm doing offline, but it's first and foremost a space for me to work in. It's a place to present myself publicly as a writer, to post and discuss my fiction, or literature, philosophy, and pop culture in ways that are relevant to writing fiction. It's a place to practice, criticize, and dissect. Hopefully, it's a place to network with other friendly and like-minded writers (who am I kidding, you don't actually need to be like-minded, so long as you're friendly!).
It's a kind of change I've thought about before. I've talked about the slow process of looking back and realizing, after the fact, that a watershed moment in life has come and gone, and that archiving what I've said in the past, here on LJ, is a lot like preserving that past self - like examining a shed skin.
Thinking about it that way lead to what I think is one of my better efforts at poetry, and I think I'm going to end my virgin* post here with that.
*well, to me at least, it does feel realistically clumsy...
Metamorphosis.
"Once I, Zhuang Zhou, dreamt that I was a butterfly. The butterfly did not know that it was Zhuang Zhou. Suddenly I awoke with a start and was Zhuang Zhou again. But I do not know whether I am Zhuang Zhou, who dreamed that he was a butterfly, or whether I am a butterfly dreaming that he is Zhuang Zhou. Between Zhuang Zhou and the butterfly there must be some distinction. This is what is called 'the transformation of things'." -Zhuang Zhou, Chinese philosopher.
From cocoon to cocoon the butterfly changes,
and dreams he's a dream in the mind of a boy.
Each time he crawls out, he fancies he's faded,
been sewn up a little tighter by the lines of his scars.
Dreams shrink; strangeness gets bled out;
and every memory is just another discarded chrysalis.
They lie in rows like gravestones, broken shapes
he crawls into sometimes as though trying to wear them,
to get back what he once dreamed he was.
Every skin he sheds, every time some dead part of him sloughs off, he wonders
if one day his innermost self will open, like a kachina doll,
and he will be empty. Vanished.
When he's the boy and not the butterfly, he feels differently.
It isn't as though those things he loses in molt are anything
he wanted to keep. He collects regrets like scars. He doesn't want them,
wants to lose them, to have pure, unblemished skin again,
but that doesn't stop him from picking at the scabs, because
he wants to remember, and he knows that memories leave marks.
If there was a way to change and stay beautiful, to not make the mistakes
of the past, he'd take it. He goes out into thunderstorms like he believes
the rain will wash his sins away. So what if the years make the butterfly smaller, uglier?
It's better than bloating, retaining the past too long, holding onto it until
you're held down by its weight. You leave the mistakes behind you. You don't
forget them. That's the path to take, he's sure of it.
In that moment between waking and sleep, when dreams melt like cotton candy or dry ice,
when it doesn't really matter whether he's boy or butterfly, whether he's destroying himself one piece at a time or pruning off the dry and dead in favor of new life,
he's at peace to stop wondering. There's something he knows in that moment. When his eyes open, he'll forget.
In part, it's a question of priorities. A lot of the posts on my old journal were friendslocked, filtered, or privatized, because they were talking about things I didn't want to share with everyone. My old journal was an intimate personal space. This journal is more of a cubicle, or a roll-top desk. There may be the occasional extraneous newspaper clipping or family photo giving insight into who I am and what I'm doing offline, but it's first and foremost a space for me to work in. It's a place to present myself publicly as a writer, to post and discuss my fiction, or literature, philosophy, and pop culture in ways that are relevant to writing fiction. It's a place to practice, criticize, and dissect. Hopefully, it's a place to network with other friendly and like-minded writers (who am I kidding, you don't actually need to be like-minded, so long as you're friendly!).
It's a kind of change I've thought about before. I've talked about the slow process of looking back and realizing, after the fact, that a watershed moment in life has come and gone, and that archiving what I've said in the past, here on LJ, is a lot like preserving that past self - like examining a shed skin.
Thinking about it that way lead to what I think is one of my better efforts at poetry, and I think I'm going to end my virgin* post here with that.
*well, to me at least, it does feel realistically clumsy...
Metamorphosis.
"Once I, Zhuang Zhou, dreamt that I was a butterfly. The butterfly did not know that it was Zhuang Zhou. Suddenly I awoke with a start and was Zhuang Zhou again. But I do not know whether I am Zhuang Zhou, who dreamed that he was a butterfly, or whether I am a butterfly dreaming that he is Zhuang Zhou. Between Zhuang Zhou and the butterfly there must be some distinction. This is what is called 'the transformation of things'." -Zhuang Zhou, Chinese philosopher.
From cocoon to cocoon the butterfly changes,
and dreams he's a dream in the mind of a boy.
Each time he crawls out, he fancies he's faded,
been sewn up a little tighter by the lines of his scars.
Dreams shrink; strangeness gets bled out;
and every memory is just another discarded chrysalis.
They lie in rows like gravestones, broken shapes
he crawls into sometimes as though trying to wear them,
to get back what he once dreamed he was.
Every skin he sheds, every time some dead part of him sloughs off, he wonders
if one day his innermost self will open, like a kachina doll,
and he will be empty. Vanished.
When he's the boy and not the butterfly, he feels differently.
It isn't as though those things he loses in molt are anything
he wanted to keep. He collects regrets like scars. He doesn't want them,
wants to lose them, to have pure, unblemished skin again,
but that doesn't stop him from picking at the scabs, because
he wants to remember, and he knows that memories leave marks.
If there was a way to change and stay beautiful, to not make the mistakes
of the past, he'd take it. He goes out into thunderstorms like he believes
the rain will wash his sins away. So what if the years make the butterfly smaller, uglier?
It's better than bloating, retaining the past too long, holding onto it until
you're held down by its weight. You leave the mistakes behind you. You don't
forget them. That's the path to take, he's sure of it.
In that moment between waking and sleep, when dreams melt like cotton candy or dry ice,
when it doesn't really matter whether he's boy or butterfly, whether he's destroying himself one piece at a time or pruning off the dry and dead in favor of new life,
he's at peace to stop wondering. There's something he knows in that moment. When his eyes open, he'll forget.
