On Bewilderment

Edited from the original entry dated 1/15/23

I feel the urge to work or create, after spending some time reflecting on Bewilderment (Richard Powers). The feeling began as an inkling to play a game of chess, or Dune, which I’m starting to recognize as a latent desire for expression.

I’ve enjoyed plinking away at fiction writing when this mood strikes, However, after such a draining and cathartic experience, it feels wasteful to enter a mindset other than my current one in order to meet the tone or genre of those works.

So for now, writing while in this mindset is best. Expression without predetermined direction.

So far, I have been enjoying this little journaling project, having created two pieces of general musings. I wonder now if reading back over what I created earlier that I would feel a pang of self-doubt, or reject the words I created. Rereading them yesterday, I found enjoyment in this voice I’ve found, and the way I structure my thoughts (word-to-word… my overall composition tends to meander). It feels like reading any of the other pieces of philosophy I’ve read so far, but more like me. As in, more from a voice that I wholly identify with.

Of course it should, since I had written it. However, to read those trains of thought collected and set into place is a relaxing thing. Both to write, and then re-read later. I have struggled for a long time in my youth to reread previous creations; I would wince in self-awareness at a younger self with plenty more to learn. I still struggle with, but can recognize, that anticipation within myself of a later me, reading back over these works and clawing at his eyes.

But now I see that feeling, and I can accept it for what it is. The truth is that they, the later me, will always be there. He will always be wiser than myself now (so long as I have anything to say about it).

That wiser me, and all of anyone else who is an audience to my voice, can think what they will. I am on a journey now to which there is no end, and so for it I am no great thing. I am only the momentum within me, and all that I can be in one given moment is the greatest momentum. I can only direct and feed it.

My greatest self is myself now, filled to the brim with nuclear star-fire, open to all the world and listening, taking those sounds and sights in, and casting them out again as music filtered through my own soul.