September 6, 2008

• If our thoughts appeared fifty meters above our heads in sentence form, the sky over cities would be black.  For the world is simply the physical place where we humans experience thoughts.  Every person, wherever they go, is having an ongoing monologue of thoughts inside their head.

  This is what makes blogging so weird; geographically, a person may be far away, experiencing thoughts throughout the day, their existence unbeknownst to you.  Yet you can become aware of what this far removed person is thinking through the rectangular portal in your house.  How odd that we should be able to see a collection of thoughts of so many different people that are all so far away! 

  On top of the remarkable aspect of the distance between the thinkers, there is the fact that we are only privy to a meager portion of the thousands of thoughts the person experienced during the day.  If our minds are like a river of thoughts, a blog post is like a few buckets of water from that river splashed on a wall.  Thus, for anything we read by another person, we should note we are seeing what they think much less than we are seeing how they think.

  Alas, it is this enterprise, the one of writing down the various trains of thought from the day, occassionally sharing some of the less bizzare ones with others, that I missed most while I was in Italy.  Without recording one’s thoughts in some place, one’s life seems to disappear, and one wonders where it went; with thoughts having been recorded, we have evidence that life did indeed happen as slowly and surely as it is to us every moment. 

  With that, I am happy to return to the world of thought-sharing, and do wish you all to forgive me for perhaps the aberrant nature of the ideas here expressed. For in real life interactions people have their minds hooked up to social reality, and the probability they will seriously consider thoughts different from that social reality is low.  Besides, in a way Xanga seems analagous to the mind, a removed place where there is perhaps a separate conversation of thoughts happening than the one immediately apparent to those around us.  For when around others we speak our thoughts, but it seems there are always also thoughts behind our thoughts, and those need a place for expression as well. 

  Writing in a journal just does not work for me, so I do feel quite ready to explode with all the thoughts I accumulated this summer.  So enjoy the few snippets from the newspaper that is my mind (in circulation since 1989) that appear here.  Anyways, glad to be back!  Hello to all Xanga friends! 

  • 4:47 pm
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