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| User: | pax_draconis (793145) In the Court of the Dragon
Beware of the Bull |
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| Name: | Ian A | |
| Location: | Somewhere Near You, United Kingdom | |
| Birthdate: | 07-07 | |
| Bio: | Things Become Real When They Are Written Down. I have always believed that, even if it’s only recently that I have been able to actually vocalise the concept. To me, the written word is somehow affirmation, proof of the solidity of the universe. Libraries and walls of books to me are comforting things, things of beauty and rightness, bulwarks against the essential chaos and uncaring randomness of the universe. This is why my chosen means of communication is the written word rather than the spoken. The telephone is an uncouth and bastard child of the written word; a by-blow of the telegraph, where one had to focus into the minimum number of words the maximum amount of meaning. I sometimes wonder if the discipline of the telegraph would not have done me a great deal of good; alas, I was born into an age where it has become nothing more than an anachronistic affectation by those who even remember it at all. The advent of Alexander Graham Bell’s creeping blight put paid to the clarity of the written word; and even now a clear century later, see how the telephone and it’s own mutant offspring, text messaging, seeks to corrupt and dilute the written word still further. Telephone conversations have horrible gaps in them. Are you supposed to speak in this stretching, unpleasant gap? Is the other person? What if you both start speaking at the same time? What if you realise that actually you have nothing to say and you are just filling the time with pointless placeholders? What if the other person realises this? It’s an exercise in excruciating embarrassment. I hate telephones with a passion and I am abrupt to the point of rudeness in trying to terminate a conversation that has stretched beyond its allotted time (which in my head is a period measured in picoseconds). I have no time for jollity on the phone. The devil instrument’s purpose is to communicate information to me in the shortest possible period – fine. But once that’s done, once I know why the call has been made, I am literally counting the seconds until the phone goes back down. Of course, this doesn’t sit well with everyone. Some people prefer the phone to textual communication. They complain that you are not prepared to spend a warm and cosy afternoon talking about nothing with the spawn of hell clamped to your ear, leeching your precious brain fluid out through your eardrum. They say that e-mail is a cold and uncaring form of communication, that it denatures your words of any feeling. Yes. That’s the bloody point. That’s why I like it so much. I’ve been accused of taking too much pleasure in sharpening e-mail until you could shave with it, of being more impressed with a clever turn of phrase than the meaning it imparts. Against these charges I have little defence. I love the language and to me, finding the exact, precise, perfect word to communicate not just your meaning but the emotional nuance you wish to impart to it is a triumph vastly more satisfying than including a bloody smiley and then complaining because everyone has assumed you’re being rude and covering it with one bracket and a colon. Language is a rich and powerful tool not treated with sufficient respect by its users, and the English language is one of the most lyrical and versatile in the world. Far better, then, to write what you feel in clear English than to use a stunted vocabulary bolstered by artificialities. That’s the theory, anyway. That doesn’t explain, though, why things become real when I write them down. There’s a permanence to the written word; a kind of solidity that a spoken conversation lacks. Spoken word is only in your head; written word has an objective existence outside your own subjective world. Others can come, they can see the words and if the writer is skilful enough they can receive the same impressions of meaning that you did. While the same is true of the spoken word, the latter requires that you be there at the time or nuance and meaning can be lost. Jokes are often abandoned halfway through a retelling with a sad “You had to be there”; whereas a literary joke is going to be as funny in ten years’ time, done right, as it was when first written. The written word, of course, has its downsides, and they too are linked to its essentially objective nature. One of them is that once written down, it’s not subject to the whim and whimsy of memory. You can go back, look at it and realise that yes; that was exactly what you wrote. Because your mind state isn’t the same now, on review, as it was then, on writing, you approach the words differently; see them in a new light. That light is not always flattering, but it does give the words an independent reality, solidity outside of your own head. I write things down to make them real, to capture snapshots of who I am as time rolls on. I look back on these windows into the mindset of the day with the same pleasure that others look at albums of photographs from a forgotten past, or wobbly videos of their adolescent selves. It is a barometer of my changeable mood, a record of the course I have taken to get to where I am now. Another charge frequently levelled at me: I make things up. Or at the very least, I embellish for flavour and humour. A trip, for instance, to get cat food becomes a five-act Greek tragedy complete with chorus and wailing of Sirens at the local bus stop. Guilty as charged, m’Lud. I have little or no interest in providing you with a dull litany of my day to day events. Almost as little interest in fact as you would have from reading it. Do you seriously want to read about me feeding the cats where nothing happens? One post which acquired some considerable plaudits from about a year ago could have been summarised with “The cat startled me, and I fell and banged my head”. I personally think my version read with a little more élan, but there it is, some people demand their plain Ryvitas and shudder at the thought of a bit of squeezy cheese on them. Well; believe you me, I’ve got more than enough squeezy cheese to share with everyone. Hunter S. Thompson, back in the sixties, pioneered Gonzo journalism (he also pioneered shooting guns at other journalists, taking unbelievable amounts of drugs and sex with hotel furniture, but I don’t believe you have to take a man’s whole creed to accept the good in a single part of it) and I am an avid disciple of his philosophy. Things in my Journal might, or might not have happened in exactly the way I describe them. But if they happened differently I can assure you the embellishments are for amusement, drama and the sake of a damn good story rather than wilful or deliberate deception. If you have a problem with that, you are almost certainly reading entirely the wrong journal. Might I suggest a news site instead. At no point in my introduction to my journal do I make a commitment to tell the unvarnished and unalloyed truth, and if that’s what you’re seeking, seek elsewhere for your dry literary biscuit. There’s no place for you here. This thing, this bizarre contraption, allows me to satisfy my frustrated inner columnist. It lets me fill the page with musings, framed sometimes by events and sometimes by recent news. But make no mistake; I write for an audience, because if I did not, then all of my entries would be private, and I would be carving dreadful poetry into my arm with a razorblade and complaining that my parents didn’t understand me. (They don’t, but that’s because I am wilfully obtuse). I love to write. I have spent all day writing this, occasionally going back to tweak a phrase here or there or taking ten minutes out to answer a works query or an e-mail. Were it not for this tool, I would not be able to refine my writing, would not be able to sharpen my wit and make the observations that I make, I would not be able to write my little columns, launch my little darts and stand on my soapbox. Without this tool, there would be no Godzilla Moments. Tokyo would be safe, Monster Island fully populated. Words are things of beauty. See what clever shapes they can make in your head. Now, I have written this down. It hasn’t really gone anywhere, and it doesn’t really mean anything. But having written it, I have made this moment real, and in time to come, whether it be a year or ten, I will be able to come back, and look at this and remember that yes, this was how I felt. It is in words that truth lays. If we stop using them, we stop telling the truth. ---- I suppose the thing with magic is that a lot of it is about writing anyway. To cast a spell, that's a fancy way of saying spelling. Grimoire, the big book of magical secrets, that's a French way of saying grammar. It's all about language and writing. It's all about incantation, all these things. Magic, really, it turns out to just be a continuation of the stuff that I've been doing anyway. Using certain arrangements of words or images to affect people's consciousness. -- Alan Moore | |
| Memories: | 17 entries | |
| Interests: | 150: adaptive social camouflage, alan garner, alan moore, alfred hitchcock, altered states of consciousness, ambrose bierce, anthropomorphic personifications of entropy, ars magica, awe, ben browder, bhutan, blue cheese, boy racers, brighella and scapino, call of cthulhu, carcosa, cars, castaigne, cats, cattle mutilations, cephalopods, chaos magick, charles fort, cheese dreams, china mieville, christopher lee, christopher marlowe, classic cars, clive barker, cold fusion, collective unconscious, commedia dell'arte, completely-covered-in-chocolate-jaffa-cakes, cult tv, dead can dance, diana rigg, directing, discordianism, dr zoidberg, driving fast, ed wood, eddie izzard, eggshell boats, emma peel, farscape, folklore, forteana, fringe science, getting inside people's heads, giant squid, gojira, gonzo, good sideburns, grail legends, grand design, h p lovecraft, haita the shepherd, harlequin and columbine, hastur, hawksmoor churches, hyperborea, iain m banks, identity, illuminati, jaguar cars, jethro tull, john tynes, jung, kate bush, kilts, king in yellow, la serenissima, leather, licking toads, lost, machiavelli, male faces, masks, meat pie floaters, mervyn peake, metallurgy, minotaurs in kilts, mischief, mithras and the bull, motorsport, mystery cults, neil gaiman, neurolinguistic programming, new world order games, nicholas hawksmoor, nikolai tesla, octopi, orlando, orpheus in the underworld, oscar wilde, pallid mask, people-watching, peter ackroyd, phantom of truth, phase state equilibrium diagrams, phillip pullman, pie, pop psychology, quatermass, reincarnation as a cephalopod, resurrecting the word "rum", right charvers, robert anton wilson, robert e howard, robert w. chambers, roleplaying, science fiction, sexuality, spirituality, spoonsize boys, squid, stanley kubrick, steampunk, tatterdemalion, taurobolium, tauroctony, tekumel, the avengers, the culture, the great red dragon, the king in yellow, the nhs, the prisoner, the wisdom of toads, thematic writing, thomas ligotti, thoughtforms, tim powers, tomato ketchup, tori amos, triumph spitfire, tulpas, turoneiromancy, urban voodoo, venice, very large acting, vincent price, vnv nation, weirdness, william blake, wit, writing, wushu, yellow sign, zenith | |
| Schools: | Arbroath High School - Arbroath, Scotland - Angus, United Kingdom (1984 - 1985) Fraserburgh Academy - Fraserburgh, Scotland - Aberdeenshire, United Kingdom (1985 - 1989) University of Wales - Newport - Newport, Wales - Newport (Casnewydd), United Kingdom (1989 - 1991) | |
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| Account type: | Basic Account | |
