I know exactly what I mean to be doing here, and I have no idea how to do it. I want to strip all the coating off my skewed view, my experiences, what I have seen of the world and made of it. This is all one can do with words, after all - or most of what's worth doing. I am no solipsist. I have strolled my proper span of the world - and I am including the real world in this, O generation of gadgeteers - and I have listened to all of you, and I have been magnified, uplifted, transported, inverted and involuted by all you have chosen to share - in accidental conversation at bus-stops, in quiet moments at work, in drunken confessional overdrive, in books noöne but me remembers, in song, on walls, and even here in tubeland. I'd like to do the same. And I have the material at hand.
But I have no idea how to speak plainly but worthily, somehow to explain:
What I learned from my mother, and why everything is the exact opposite of what it appears to be, and why you might want to trust noöne, but befriend everyone, and why the felonies of the evil should be downgraded to misdemeanors, and why virtues and vices as the opposite edges of the same blade and why our grandchildren will look on us with contempt when we try to explain how we could live in these times and not simply scream in horror and claw out our own eyes.
Why a hero is a villain with a good publicist. And how it is that people don't think, but they somehow don't perish.
And the wars between spiders, and how it is to be frail and afraid. And how we all conspire to suppress what we don't know, and to protect what we think we do know. And why people tend to kill their betters - and that there are such things as betters.
And how a bird that dwarfed the ostrich is now gone, but only recently. That the sky is full of marvels, and the earth conceals others - mazes of bones, fungi acres wide, prodigious worms and inexplicable warmth. I wish to remind us that "fantasy" is pretty weak tea compared to reality.
And why the problem is really, at base, that people keep buying things, which is because they refuse to use properly the things that already exist. And how we will all die horribly because of this.
Or: That the world has been misrepresented, and everything is marvelous, but splendidly grotesque. And then again, that people are routinely small, evil, and foolish. And how so much of it reduces to these facts. And yet - our venality and pettiness - our fundamental brutishness is somehow a facet of the jewel, a phase of its splendour.
Or I wish to hold up a garish Victorian mirror, and show you a race of goblins inhabiting a goblin universe.
So: How does one go about that?
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Writing ;
Memoirs