and I have been trying ever so slightly to come across a specific passage in Tropic of Cancer, but as much as I hope to see it with my own eyes--because indeed I know it is there--it simply won't present. I spend my days scouring the pages, in chronological order growing closer to the end, or at least the end of this one...and nothing. And I don't want to admit that it might be what I am looking for--because that is a secret.
Henry Miller's stream of consciousness reminds me of the things I have heard about James Joyce--about his stream-of-consciousness writing style that leads sentences into paragraphs into full chapters, never pausing for a minute to punctuate, and take a break.
I wonder why these things cause me to react in a similar way--why reading someone else's train of thought from one hundred or more years ago changes my own from punctuated and concise to rambling, thought provoking (even), bumbling, un-ordered, un-conjugated muttering of somethings...but nothing as decisive as a stream of consciousness..nothing that actually takes me anywhere except further in to my own head.
But I no longer want to blame Miller or Joyce because thinking back, I've always thought like this--only, I have always tried harder to disguise it...to change the way the words come out, from the way they existed in the first place.
Words. They mean nothing until we tack meaning on to them...they are empty vessels that we restock like freight container ships--letting them empty and lose their meaning and then rebuilding and filling them with new connotations..annotations. denotations? Words are just sounds we've learned to make with our mouths and tongues and breath and voices...words are meaningless, were meaningless until we learned meaning in itself. Then we were able to attach distinct meanings to distinct sounds--words came about. We created them; this means we can also destroy them, will destroy them.
And what might come after words? When we have exhausted, torn, twisted and pilaged them...what then? We'll have no more use for them--they'll be tossed out the window (if we have those anymore) like an old pair of socks. Perhaps, we will even cease to communicate at all.
I don't believe in the space age.
It seems like such a fabrication from such a small and idealistic group of people...people who would have to convince so many more people that any of this could be possible, and more than that, useful.
I think instead we should regress.
Progress could still be regression--that is, perhaps going back to the beginnings of things might be a better act of moving forward than moving forward itself--the moving forward we mean when we talk of moving forward.
Speaking of moving--here, for now, for today and this day--I am done. I am moving on.