A Manic Love Song to Thinking

I cannot sleep. I find myself beset by a raucous mental clamouring that makes me feel a stranger in my own head. Nothing can stifle the din. The will, in this particular case the will to sleep, is revealed as subservient to louder psychical forces at work. For me insomnia is a manic love song to thinking. Inchoate thoughts, ill formed, leap at one another, pirouette wildly around each other and ricochet in a desultory, kaleidoscope-like chaos. It is a rigorously invigorating state of consciousness that dissembles a sort of hyper-awareness that is in truth a heady stupor. Volition is illusory and thoughts come unbidden and at such a pace and with such feeling that I can hardly claim ownership of them. It's 3:36. I'm in full surrender to consciousness. I update my facebook status: "Insomnia Night 2: Cerebral Capitulation to Consciousness" hoping someone will answer. I feel like I could run for miles, and indeed just returned inside from cruising around on my longboard. It's 3:41. My heart ticks a quick tock as I try and force the visceral energy I feel into self-expression. I think about Rousseau who revolutionized poetry and defined an era by laying claim on the individual self as worthy subject for poetic consideration. Insomnia is narcissistic and since it's a sort of self-surrender (to forces of consciousness autonomous from ego-will), self-preoccupation doesn't seem inorganic to the experience. I wouldn't be surprised if Rousseau suffered from insomnia but profited thereby in his writing. It's 3:47. That makes me think of 24 with its frantic pacing and schizoid plot twists, all the while a doomsday clock ticking down the time to inspire within the viewer its own stupid frenzy. It's 3:50. 4 am is looming and I will not sleep for another hour at least. It's 3:55. It's 3:59. With all of the thoughts swirling in my brain (funny that fatigue should have as its companion such energy) you'd think I'd have more to write. It's 4 am. Sigh.

Quotidian or Quixotic?

That is my question. I intend this blog post to be an evocation (perhaps a re-inauguration?) of an earlier time when my applied vocabulary was more abstruse, when I would marshall words from the hinterlands of my lexicon to aid in the battle for (perhaps against, sometimes) expressive meaning. I was taken to task for my bombast and pomposity by teachers and my mom, however, something about being unaccessible and pretentious. I realized later that in so doing I had violated one of the great projects of the English discipline. In a spirit of cosmopolitanism English studies have sought to potentiate formerly marginalized voices through cultural studies and programs. Feminism, multiculturalism, gay studies, along with a slew of other isms and programs have fulminated against the hegemony of the white middle to upperclass male whose aesthetic interests have been occlusively represented within what He has deemed to be the literary canon. I had adopted a similar aesthetic within my diction while writing. It is the hegemony of the prosaic and it is a populist appeal to mediocrity and homogeneity. To mediocrity because it does not encourage growth, and evinces the assumption that the status quo is what should be adhered to. Meanwhile the brain, capable of so much more, whithers and atrophes. I harbor a differing ethos. I agree with the cosmopolitan projects of social justice that seek to potentiate those whose voices have been stifled and strangulated by the hegemony of the prosaic. In my writing I priviledge heterogeneity within diction as mimetic of these currents and sine qua non to my own personalized style. Arcane language, or once common language that has become arcane because of mediocrity and the hegemeony of homogeneity, will find voice once again.

Moreover I have found that such a florid writing style fosters greater fecundity of thought and a more imaginative synthesis of ideas.

By way of desultory caveat I started training to work at the Women and Children in Crisis Shelter in Provo. I decided that I needed to take my personal philosophy of ethics as primary religious experience from its supine state into active practice. Karen Armstrong explicated in her book The Spiral Staircase that the only true test of authenticity for a religious idea was if it led to a greater capacity to act from a compassionate space. For too long my ideology has not informed my actions. Jung stated that nothing influences behavior less than intellectual ideas. Immersing myself in the particular issues of specific people I hope to gain a better understanding of the ideas I have been studying regarding gender issues.

So, quotidian or quixotic? To write like this is quixotic because you take the mundane and dress it up. You take a windmill and turn it into a dragon. It's more enjoyable, for me at least, and occasions needed exercise for some atrophied intellectual muscles. It is contrived and often desultory, but also salutary (I think) for parts of my brain needing oxygen.

Ciao,
The Somnolent Somnambulist