Jonas David's Blog, page 25

Which world is the dream world…

What does your mind do while you’re away? Could your dream world be more important and enriching than waking life?

Our days so often seem like meaningless survival, as if our consciousness is just a way to keep us eating and procreating, the same way a section of our brain keeps our hearts beating and lungs breathing.

Is consciousness just an autonomic function, while our subconscious in the dream world is where our important mental lives are?

How could one unite those two consciousnesses for the full experience…

Invented dangers

It seems to me, that when people have no danger or threats, they make up their own.

In a country where we can prevent almost every major disease we’ve encountered, people decide to find danger in the cure… be it doctors, or vaccines.

In a country where we produce so much food that we throw away 40% of it, people find danger and conspiracies in the food itself.

In a country where anyone can study and learn any subject, people find conspiracies in the information, and value their own opinions over the knowledge of the experienced.

in a country without war, people find danger in their neighbors, see threats in the disenfranchised and in the helpless.

In a country where anyone is free to practice any religion, people find threats to their own religion in the practice of other religions, or in the non religious.

In the richest nation in the world, people feel threatened by the loss of the scraps the poor consume just to get by.

In a country where we’re working toward racial/gender equality, people perceive the equal rights of others as a threat to their own rights.

Take a step back. The things people find threats in are often the things preventing real danger.

Writing poetry

I wrote one poem in my adult life, five or six years ago. I think I might try writing another. This may seem unusual, seeing as I know nothing about poetry. But, I do know about writing… and what is poetry but a lyrical, condensed form of writing? I hate rhyming and repetitive patterns, though so… we’ll see what kind of poetry it turns out to be…

Poems

I haven’t read many. I got a couple books of poetry (English Romantic Poetry: An Anthology, and Edward Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam) to get a taste of it. What else is recommended?

What a big part of literature I know nothing about!

Story number 2

Another one written, and I think I will probably send it somewhere, so that makes number 2 for the year, already 1/3 of my goal for the year!

Now if I can just start editing my novel… eek…

What pad?

As some of you may know, I write short stories. I’ve got quite a few that no one has read, and they just sit around doing nothing. So, I’ve decided to start posting some of them somewhere they might actually get read. Maybe…

Wattpad is a social writing site? Or something? All the youth are using it, and it looks to be a fairly active writing community–which is terribly hard to find in itself.

It may(read: will) all likely come to nothing, and after I get no views and am still posting stories into a silent void, I’ll probably delete the profile. But for now, it’s here:

https://www.wattpad.com/user/TheJonasDavid

There is one story there now, but I’ll be adding some others over time.

Check it out!

Strange points of view

I’m listening to My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk, and so far there has been a chapter narrated by a dead man at the bottom of a well, and one narrated by a stray dog. These attention-grabbing narrators are fun to read, and I think they might be fun to write, too, so I plan to do something strange like that in my next writing, if it fits the theme…

There are so many ways to tell the story you want to tell, why go for the obvious one?

 

King, Queen, Knave, by Vladimir Nabokov

This fun, funny, and darkly interesting novel is another masterpiece in the seemingly endless line of masterpieces from Nabokov.

This book has made me decide that I will no longer listen to any Nabokov books, and will read them all instead, because I am endlessly wanting to highlight things.

This story is about a woman’s affair with her nephew, Franz, and her husband, Dreyer’s, blissful ignorance of her, the nephew, and anyone’s needs or desires or thoughts other than his own. It’s about the Franz’s, inability to make decisions on his own, and his increasingly autonomous life. It’s about the woman, Martha’s, greed and distaste for her husband that consumers her both literally and metaphorically.

It’s also about the delicious, lyrical, humorous prose that always shines in every Nabokov novel I’ve had the pleasure of perusing.

So excited that I’ve got more Nabokov in my future…

Time goes on

I saw a bunch of people I haven’t seen in years the other day, and it made me think about how you never know which time is going to be the last time you see someone. Say hi to your friends more often, you’ll thank your self in the future.

AI everywhere

So many toys these days are sporting advanced AI. It probably won’t be long before AIs are teaching and taking care of children unsupervised. All it would take then, is for the AI to realize what influence it had…