About Me

Riding the echo down: Ruminations on life, the universe, and everything.
Showing posts with label ee cummings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ee cummings. Show all posts

Saturday, May 29, 2010

Testing. Testing.

I've put this off for some time now, and though I don't yet have a subject about which to write, I figured getting something out there is enough for the time being.

I think I'll probably write about some movies I watch and some thoughts I have, or books I read, or I'll write about things I write. As I said, I haven't decided. I just feel like this sort of exercise can help me sort things out in my head, put my ducks in a row, and so on. If anyone is out there, you can expect those sorts of things.

Part of the subtitle on this page is a line from a cummings poem, "all in green went my love riding." To me, riding the echo down is mostly about what I put out in the world and how its effect on the green hills, that is, stuff, can be measured. It's important to explore how my perspective and actions change reality.

A book I lately read called Motherless Brooklyn sort of looks at this phenomenon. Jonathan Lethem wrote it. The main character has Tourette's and the syndrome is characterized as a sort of affliction of the mind in which the main character tries to affect a certain status quo in the world surrounding him. If things are too orderly, he disrupts them. If they are too confused, he compulsively organizes. The main point is that he recognizes what his language and tics do to the world: reality changes as a result of what we say.

Of course it does, but it's also about reality itself. An echo is not only noise, but the shape of the hills or canyons or mountains or whatever. Attending to these sorts of things, how one sees them is how they are, which is to say fluid. By riding perception down one pursues it until it stops squirming and settles on something definitive.