Word Vomit

0231 – don’t be an eagle in a cage

visakanv
February 7, 2015

Here’s a random thought– I remember once reading in Bass Player magazine about a bassist who played for a circus, and I thought to myself– wow, that must be an amazing gig. I can’t remember the precise details of the circus bassist’s gig, but I like thinking that he played along to acrobats and to horses and all sorts of tricks and flourishes– and the idea of that really tickled me. It seemed so much bigger and grander than what I had considered a bassist’s job to be.

I also got really into the idea of being the bass player at a cabaret– I imagine like this really varnished, cigars-and-whiskey, 50s or 70s sort of charm. Corsets, fishnet stockings, garters. Gentlemen in suits and vests and bowler hats. Most importantly, the groove never stops– from opening time to closing time, it just keeps going. Someone’s always keeping it alive– a drummer, a bass player… actually, what else plays in a caberet? Brass, I imagine– saxaphones, trumpets, trombones. Lots of sharp moves, big smiles, big band stuff. (Looked caberet music up on YouTube– listening to this now… just realized I missed out the piano. Oops.)

I wonder how these curiosities and curious thoughts translate to other spheres outside of music. In the above cases, I learnt to think of music as more than just something contained within 3 minute pop songs, or even albums– rather, they were deconstructed into entire, holistic experiences. Which in turn reminds me of the following image, from a subway station in Berlin:

caged-eagle

I feel very strongly about this. I tried to allude to this when talking about Landsburg’s More Sex is Safer Sex– there’s the content of the writing itself, and there’s the context. There’s a whole art to context. There’s the book, and there’s the library that the book is in, or the gallery or whatever. The photo, and the frame. You have to plan for the totality of the experience. What happens before, what happens after, how everything comes together.

Okay, you get the idea. [1]

So what is the totality of experience of these vomits? I started out wanting to just complete this, and it was in a sense meant to be somewhat deliberately inacessible. Not so much BY design, but more of… I was deliberately deciding not to care about it. But if I thought about caring about it over the course of writing it, then that would be okay. I allow myself to change my priorities and parameters over time. The only thing that really needs to be maintained from start to finish is 1000 sessions of 1000 words– everything else is totally a candidate for change. I might end up doing some sort of weird project where vomits 300 to 400 are a work of fiction, and 401 to 500 are some other genre. Why not? I can’t possibly spend one MILLION words just talking about meatbag management, context management, resource management? There has to be more.

I can only write about my experience. My problem is that I don’t know what I don’t know, and I don’t know what’s hiding from me in plain sight. Am I bored? Boredom is an expression of laziness, and I am not lazy. The world is endlessly fascinating. There is more that I want to do than I will ever be able to do, so I should pick something and start doing it. Right now it feels like I’m just writing for the sake of writing, to see how long I can keep this going. Does it mean that I’ve run out of things to say? Of course not. There is always more to say. But at the present moment I’m not sure what’s the most interesting thing to say. And I’m not sure if I can get to more interesting things just by pursuing the next word. But let’s keep going. Let’s just keep moving. I can afford to toss out a few vomits in the pursuit of mindless banality just to see if everything gets exhausted. Maybe in the next vomit I’ll start making lists and see if I get tired of that. Hey, wasn’t that what Bradbury suggested for writing exercises? Pick nouns that mean something to you and really explore them. I think that’s going to happen.

I have about a hundred words to close my thoughts on caged eagles. I know what the script is for a caged eagle– that every eagle is in its own cage, in a sense, in the cage that says “I am an eagle”– (i’m talking about people, not actual eagles. Nature doesn’t give a fuck.) The concept “eagle” is a cage. The concept “cage” doesn’t nearly map onto “eagle” as much. So there is an asymmetry there.

Do I feel like a caged eagle? Maybe. I think it’s more like– I’m not sure what to feel. I know the big picture– in the later stages I’m a big confident eagle, sure. But right now, what am I? I’m just a feathered dude banging his head silly against the wood, because he’s curious to see what happens. Let’s see what happens. Let’s keep moving.

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[1] Where does lead to, with other things in my life? How am I caged? I’m currently listening to Brian Eno’s Music For Airports as I write this, and I went to look him up again– and rediscovered that he made the Windows opening theme. He talked about how interesting it was to try and write a piece of music that short, and have all of those qualities. It was like crafting a little jewel. Maybe my problem right now is that I’m trying to write… 1000 words, over and over again. And I’ve gotten stretched really thin. The openness has become a sort of birdcage of its own. For me to break from it I need to give myself some interesting constraints. I need to frame things as problems so that I can solve them. (This is somewhat unrelated to the premise of this post– it’s really more of a function of the music I’m listening to.)

What sort of constraints can I give myself, that would challenge me? I got into this idea of compressing each vomit into a tweet. What if I dedicated a couple of vomits to that, rather than adding a tweet to each vomit? That might be a little more interesting.