There's this flood of writers and nearly all of them want to be published-authors instead of authors. The love for the writing has to come first before the love for getting published. The publishing houses and their efficiency for sales are for getting published. The media glitz and the contracts and the competing dollar signs are for getting published. The occupationalization of writing and the workshops with admissions procedures and classrooms are for getting published. The adoration of the writer and the experience of celebrityism of the photographed standing behind the podium is for getting published. The love is for the writing. It has to be, or the writing dies.

So I think we spend our lives, human and all, figuring out the meaning of words, figuring more and more that there are so many more meanings to the words we know--like a fractal, but limited, because our lives are limited--like love; like hate; like understand, understandings, etc.

The Ultimate Declaration, in the World of this Blog

This will be my final submission, for at the least one year, as I've come to understand that while I came to generate this as an online catalogue, organizing the writings of my development, it has changed to become only a distraction. As email as a form of communication, or, the nearest to omnipresent takeover of corporate marketing objectives as our everyday bread and thought in this consumerSimCity, our allegiance to The Bank, this blog, or simply, the presence of it, here, for me, has shattered my focus, or better put, my concentration. And concentration, or, the lack of it, seems to me the one central pillar that keeps me from doing what I want to do, writing what I'd like to write.

Just as the Bible is flipped open to have given holy direction & answers in as many times of need as there is time, and as at Robert Creeley's memoriam so many of his loved ones and those who loved him parted open a volume of poetry as the only method that they could turn to, to sustain them, the sources for this answer here come from some things I impulse to cite: On my second reading of Gilead, which it occured that I for the first time thought to be so fortunate to be alive, a young, opinionated and functioning reader for this its publication, re-read over the lines on pg. 7, "One great benefit of a religious vocation is that it helps you concentrate. It gives you a good basic sense of what is being asked of you and also what you might as well ignore. If I have any wisdom to offer, this is a fair part of it."; also, a conversation yesterday about e-mail lowering the populous IQ by 10 points, though I invest as little as any in the content of a statistic like that, it did act to connect me from one thought now to the next, to this declaration for Minding My Own Mind.

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In reading over this just now, Who am I talking to?

Night of the Living

All through the past week, and even from the second I got this job, I've had flashes of skepticism quietly lightning through my mind. All the dollar $igns, numbers, and 401(k)s, and revolving door glass facade, benefits & healthcare plans, or-ientation, drill, drill, drill, silent; the keycards and access, and the modern turnstile-like arms that really say, You shall pass, and the immaculate ornery glass mirrors everywhere, the elevators, the real big fucking commissioned artworks at the lobby of Sachi & Sachi building. And people feeling important. And people laughing important. And people dressing the way they're laughing, or acting the way they're dressing. And talking. Office-talk. That I don't really have a problem with. In fact, things have been really mostly great. There's just something there, I can't find, that's bothering the hell out of me.

I can't help but think of Night of the Living Dead, or any other of those movies that express that fear of existence within a context so well. Money, we just really need it--we need to do this to make money--and so we really just need to do this. And that's that.

It's right, right? It's right, if I didn't have an HMO, I wouldn't be able to get my tooth yanked out when I needed it. It's wrong, and if you just fucking admitted it was wrong, and acted through wrongly, it would be right somehow some measure. But don't say--and then believe lyingly--that it's right.

Shit I wish I could say it, and when I understand it to express it, I'll tell you then. Notwithstanding, so many artists have done it, they know it! See that's the thing about literature--you see?, when can you understand and know that something is really wrong, instead of just something else about every generation feels awry, like growing pains? You say it's surprising I never "studied" philosophy--With literature, a story, you get to know a person, a time--be it from the 40s or 60s or the 19th century--and you know that person in a way you don't even know speaking with a contemporary peer over time: you are vocalizing the words of the author projecting their time, saying the words of the character in your own head as if they were yours and that's how literature lives and is loved. You're getting such a human form of history that you would never get in history lessons--well, generalizing, stereotyping the most conventional ones--and it's a matter of empathizing the human experience, rather than just facts. And from the facts alone, you can't understand, because everyone from then's dead. And once you understand, or at least get one perspective's feel for a time period, that's when you have the ability to compare, understand real differences, and really see if there's something really wrong and what's wrong about it. A ton of artists have known this current trend of anomoly. The Night. The Dead.

That's why I loved him

Abe Young to robert_creeley

Dear Prof. Creeley,
[How are you? Forgive me for the dive into my random ponderings, I wanted to get my thoughts down:]

I don't know where to start; so I say, What am I doing here.
For a moment after some time flipping through our massive BMC: Experiment in Art book again, it appeared clear to me--in one way to see it--what you did in our Black Mountain seminar, and what this was that struck my thinking-soul so proximately and lastingly: it was the simple speaking--the conversational, instead of objectifying, abstract lecturing--of things, in the space of our circular-set chairs around the room (of which I was so nostalgic in seeing last month, on a side note!); the distance from one to the other, with no "filtering"/standardizing middle. Since the beginning, when I tried describing the class to friends, I had always come out saying, "And he would tell anecdotes throughout class about him, his life, these people"; and I guess that's as close as learning, or anything really, ever got.

Painting's, and subsequently other art fields', move "away from the insistently pictorial to a direct manifestation of the energy inherent in the materials, literally, and their physical manipulation," (if I'm being incoherent and incomplete I'm sorry: I mainly looked through pg.
293 and some of the rest) really resembles in the way teaching-learning can be processed in the school--whatever that may be--I guess is the point I'm stumbling into now. I remember now one of the first sessions of class and I had blurted out that for my part I'd research the immediate setting and physical environment of the college & students; and that was fortunate also in the sense of our seminar to better have the "materials" of the place, Black Mountain.

And I try to understand recent times more this land that I increasingly understand to frame that I am a part of. So I guess it really now links back to my initial question at the beginning of this letter: in it, what is "here"? and is it to some degree in our experiences "not having history," this America, and thus leaving us less bogged to weild and use our vocuabulary, like John Chamberlain uses proximate car parts to create? What is this Place-for-me's history, or lack thereof; and on a more personal reflection, what eye do I see all of this from, part of me having come late into this America from a different nation/culture, another part of me more American and reaching halfway around the globe from my physical location to claim my parents, my childhood (3 yrs of it), and that Taiwanese soil?

--The hard part, for my obviously bewildered-in-world stage of self (which may never end as I understand), even after somehow answering the "here," I still have the earth-big What am I doing to tango forever with.

Forgive me for wandering so widely in my thoughts; let me center a bit. So what prompted me initially to write you were a few things: the quasi-revelation that brought a silly smile of satisfaction to my face, sensing that education, itself, is an art; or at least it runs in parallel with much of the creative materialization processes of art. And also the other thing that I've been wondering and wanting to mention: when I visited Providence last month, I left you a wooden
gift in the main office of the Brown writing building, so hopefully you received it--and if not, the man in the office then must have forgotten to mention it to you.

Professor Creeley, I hope you have been well, and, seeing that the semester must be winding down, that the seminar has been a satisfactory one for all of you. I'm sure it has. Happy
Thanksgiving, and the best to you and your family!

Best as always,
Abe


Dear Abe,
Thanks very much for that charming wooden sculpture, which did get to us sans problem -- and please forgive the slowness of reply and all. Your letters are very useful and locating for me -- and I hope for you too -- i.e., they give me the generous feedback which makes it all for real, like they say. Just now we are staggering on through Thanksgiving break here and the very forseeable end of the semester as all the Xmas shlock begins to flood in. Twiddling dial of car radio coming back here from New York yesterday, I happened upon first heard carol of
the impending season, that "drummer boy" one, sort of transitional I guess.

Not just since the bleak election but really for some real time, even years now, the presence of a global imperialism, call it, certainly the appetite for it, has made it so hard to find a locating place in the world. Almost as if the choices were either one\'s own immediate body, else the useless vastness of the world \'market." Columbus must have felt he was setting out from some place, even if it wasn\'t where he was from specifically --but now one has the sense of floating about in a wash of flotsam, trying to find significant "landfall" but increasingly frustrated to do so. Anyhow enough! Do write as you can and despite I take time to answer, I am delighted to hear from you.

Onward!

Best as ever,
Robert Creeley