Three Fingers

In what seems like a fantastic fact, I haven’t done any writing in quite a while, but I woke up today (already awake of course), and the urge to deflower a perfectly innocence blank space with characters and metaphors sprang up from the time fog.
It’s an almost primal urge. The need to create, I mean. What is it from human history that instills in all of us the drive to create something out of nothing? It is probably related to the fact that the consciousness, subconsciously, feels the need to illustrate to itself exactly how it came into being. It looks at itself and wonders how there was nothing there, then there was this thing, and a thing to recognize that thing apart from other things. So, when we create something, we take essentially nothing and make it something.
Midnight on Sunday, there is three fingers of whisky next to me in a small glass, and that will probably serve me throughout this entire writing process.
Life is sometimes only about focus. What the human character focuses on is the road that particular character is choosing to walk down, and it is always a choice. You can choose to focus on anything, but I think there’s a funny sort of turnaround that happens when your focus is on the big picture—and I’m not talking about in a business sense because even that is not broad enough.
One generally thinks of focus as a pinpoint. When you focus all of your energy and attention on this one particular thing, that is focus, which is true; however, it is also entirely possible to focus on one particular thing like existence. What is it like when your focus is entirely on what this thing existence is? It’s a focus of a different kind, isn’t it? There is very little that doesn’t fall under the scope and scale of existence, and when you focus on a full existence, only wanting to become yourself, an endless hallway lined with doors seems to open up right in front of your eyes. Existence is every one of those doors and none of them simultaneously. Each door is a part of existence and the whole of it. Each one of them has to represent the infinite eternal present instant. That is where existence takes place, in the present progressive reality of the human being. Humans are not present simple—something immortalized, usual or always true. Humans began at some point in the past, are moving through something, and that something is expected to continue until an unknown point in the future. I am living.
Sartre’s idea that we don’t use language like a tool (some kind of hammer for a metalworking experiment), we exist language is never more apparent than in the unfortunate area of grammar. Why do we need grammar? It is an illustration of the state of the human character. Oh, you ought to know that USING proper grammar is not important except in the area of thorough information conveyance, but grammar itself is an invaluable peak at the inner workings of human beings.
What are the easiest things in life? Things we know are always true. Things that happened at some point in the past and have been immortalized—either in writing or scheduling. Things that are even usually true are pretty simple. This is why, most of the time, the present simple for most verb forms is the easiest—very few oddities.
What is the most difficult thing in life? Life. To be is pretty difficult. I know that in at least three languages, “To Be” is always an irregular verb form. What does that tell you? In Korean, they separate something that is inherent inside of you (something you have—I have 26 years inside me… “I am 26 years old”) from something that you do (“I am a teacher”). They both translate to “I am,” but they are rendered differently in Korean.
What about the future? We don’t know a whole lot about the future, and the form is usually some form of the present simple: I will talk to you later. The unknowable future manifests itself in its connection with the present.
The past, especially in English, is probably the most difficult verb tense to get your head around. There are so many irregular past tense verbs that it makes the head spin. Smack that together with the past participle, and your left in the lurch. If we take a look at that, the past is complicated, isn’t it? And I’m not talking about grammar any more. We carry the past around with us, but it’s always changing based on new information that we have gathered or how our memory has retained the information we learned.
If you’re confused, imagine the difficulty of teaching these things to children. Well, to be fair, I don’t have to teach children that they ARE language and this manifests itself in grammar, but the reality of teaching that to them makes it a very daunting task. While they don’t need to know it, they need to understand it at some level. All of us understand it at some level. That’s why we use the language we do. It is we. This is probably why one of my favorite pastimes, one of my favorite hobbies is wandering through meaning. What does something mean? What can a single word mean? What does it mean to ask a question instead of making a statement?
I have been told, more than once… recently, that it can sometimes be no fun talking to me because my questions are always really difficult, and this can be a little off-putting. I remember that one of those times it was after asking what constitutes a coincidence, whether it’s related to an accident, and if one is a derivative of the other. I find that defining words as thoroughly as possible is a great workout for the brain, but sometimes people actually want to talk a lot of rot. If you were a toaster, what would you say to the person that owned you?
These are the questions that pop through my head. Even the fact that most of what happens in my head happens in the form of a question is an illustration—from a grammatical standpoint—of my character. For anybody that wanted to know, that’s pretty much how I go about living: questions. What happens when I do this? Okay. Lesson learned. What happens when… this? Okay. Life is a question that isn’t meant to be answered, but is sure as hell meant to be asked.
This week is a big question for me. Something new is starting, and I understand that vagueness can be a very irritating thing for people—especially me. I’m off and wandering into a world of meaning again, and there is excitement for me at a soul level because this is something that I have wanted for a long time. It doesn’t mean anything technically, but it means what it will. I wrote that line in a poem a long time ago: “It means what it will in the future,” and I have found it more and more true as time has passed. Most things that happen only develop meaning as time washes over it. What does that mean from a grammar standpoint?
I guess the last thing I’m going to say is that art is in the same tense as the human being. Art was created at some time in the past, is moving the present and will continue until an unknown time in the future. Even performance art started, is affecting, and will continue to affect. How many people were affected by something they saw and made a change in their life that will continue into the future?
What will you investigate over the course of three fingers of whisky?