Slow meandering, books, jam.

This isn't very well worked out, so bear with me (is this a new category, akin to “posts where I write about the difficulty of writing posts”, that incorporates all posts? Something something set theory).

In terms of actual relationships with real people, I have been/have followed a polyamorous structure (fuck it's ages since I’ve looked at Reddit, is the whole identity/practice argument even a thing any more? I mean, overall in terms of how we understand being, yes, obviously it's a thing. But is it a thing on Reddit?) for.. maybe half/one third of my teenage->adult life. It is the one that I find works best for me, which is to say that other ways of being in romantic relationships either have never held appeal or, when I’ve tried them, just plain haven't worked, and it's what I currently do/am (can I make a new word there? My German teacher recently suggested ersie (er + sie) as a German gender-neutral pronoun. Can we do that with other concepts? Can I have amdo as a contraction* that expresses the whole being as a process thing? This is why Heidegger got into such a pickle, isn't it? (with Beying, not with the Nazism. That one was on him).

Anyway, what I have been sporadically thinking about instead this month/morning (mornthing?) is reading.

Enough of real people. Books!

(I’ve also realised this post might mostly be about Contrapoints’ latest video, it's about 62 hours long, but I enjoyed it, would recommend)

I have been writing fiction (did I mention that? Did I tell you that already? Oh, I did? Really? Allow me to mention it again..) and it's been making me think about love-as-a-creative-act-thesis-chapter-one-available-in-all-good-search-engines. And! I’ve been reading George Saunders’ A Swim in a Pond in the Rain - my partner lent? gave? me this and it is excellent and I cannot recommend it highly enough - which talks about leaving the gaps for the reader to fill in (David Lynch talks about this with films, and, I dunno, like, some philosophers talk about it? or whatever? anyway). So I have been thinking about the relationship with a book you are reading in these kind of creative act/romantic terms, and realising that I have become vastly more polyamorous in my reading habits. So many books, all at once/in different repetitive rhythms, and it feels great! It is also, perhaps, easier to do with non-fiction than with fiction… (or with certain types of narrative fiction at any rate).

Did I have a point? I'm not sure I had a point to any of that. The thing about doing other writing is that I have slowly eked the construction of this blog post out over the course of the whole month, and now cannot remember precisely what I was thinking when I started it. Tldr: reading a book is like falling in love, because you are (a little bit) creating that which you are reading. I used to be more of a serial monogamist with books - still am with fiction. But can now happily maintain a polycule of ten different non-fiction books at once, without them (hopefully) feeling neglected.

No point, just a consciousness of difference. Hurrah!

*A “contamination” rather than a contraction, according to Hjelmslev, who is the current morning philosophy book. In a linguistics way, not in a bad way. Unlike jam that has gone mouldy because of the breadcrumbs, languages just get tastier with more life in them.