Borges / Compulsion

A question written and rewritten: Why am I capable of ambivalence about the response to these Informalities but am incapable of the same when it comes to tweets? 

Borges, in 1935’s, “A Theologian In Death,” offers a possible answer:

“Then he began to write something about charity; but what he wrote on the paper one day, he did not see the next; for this happens to every one there when he commits any thing to paper for the external man only, and not at the same time for the internal, this from compulsion and not from freedom; it is obliterated of itself.”

Jorge Luis Borges

The Informalities satisfy not only the external but primarily the internal, a need to express myself via the discipline of a daily challenge, a contrasting companion to the water-boil-toil-simmer of The Work that exercises another facet of writing, the churn. Tweets, though I may, in moments of wavering delusion, tell myself differently, are for the external only, for a compulsion, a falling into the addictive nature of half-thought transformed into currency for the social slot machine. 

Solution: Be mindful of this dichotomy of purpose; make Twitter its own challenge, part of the internal, the discipline of choosing result-agnosticism – readjust (read: eliminate) attachment and expectation and continue on. 

Listening: Beth Gibbons and The Polish National Symphony Orchestra, GORECKI: SYMPHONY NO.3 (SYMPHONY OF SORROWFUL SONGS) – Gibbons shines; in equal turns spectacular and surprising, a beautiful – live! – rendition.