musings aggregated in a ten minute's walk in the pouring snow

1. so much happening in the external world, while so much is happening internally, in this secret, hidden dimension inhabited by people's thoughts--personal universes braided limply together

 2. why writing about your own experience is not selfish: just like writing in the first person perspective (I) is often better accepted by an audience versus writing in the second (you) which elicits a negative response from the reader--the reader rebels against the presumptuousness of the writer, how dare you think you know me, this isn't me, etc. Same goes for writing on behalf of people, instead of connecting the reader, this creates a distance. people can much more easily connect to an "I" perspective because this allows them to find parallels between the "I" created by the author and their own "I". It doesn't necessitate an absolute parallelism or mirroring between the two. there is no pretension in writing from your own thoughts or experiences without concealing or blurring their relation to you, only honesty.

3. discussions: everyone is coming from a different place. everyone measures thoughts or ideas against the backdrop of their own intellectual or theoretical foundation in order to derive a sense of meaning or understanding from them. this subjectivity explains why nobody will ever be truly on the same plane in a discussion. everyone has their own history of experience from which they pull ideas that intrigued them, ideas that they spent time turning over. these ideas will almost always take initial precedence over fully formed ideas contributed by external persons (idea of personal wisdom derived from personal experience trumping wisdom derived from other people's advice)--what this perhaps suggests is that we attribute greater value to the knowledge that we have had to go through certain lengths to attain--some work, some translation or formulation had to take place in our minds to get us from point a to point b, there had to have transpired some germination of an idea. this contrasted with knowledge or a fully formed idea that was simply handed to us. this is what makes discussion so fascinating though, the coming together of all of these separate universes that we inhabit in the seclusion of our minds, the clashing of conflicting or perhaps interconnected ideas, each external idea interacting with our internal ones and creating something perhaps altogether new, or at the very least activating other streams of thought.

 4. why my quest for beauty is not a superficial or irrelevant one: things, entities and ideas, shift depending on how you define them...i happen to position beauty in the broad realm of the intricacies and intrigues that emerge in life-moments of insight or unique or telling parallels between things discovered, just solid and compelling thoughts or ideas, however "serious" or painful or grotesque or structured they may be, there is no limit to this conception of beauty. beauty is not confined to only that which possesses a conventional, aesthetic beauty, but is rather an umbrella term which contains beneath its sweeping body anything that is good and true and powerful.

5. thinking about how crazy it is that one thought sets off another like a firework and they just keep at it, multiplying, each one splitting from the other like cell division and it is impossible to cap them with a stopper because you don't want to stop it. remembered jk rowling's conception of a pensieve and thought how funny it is that, again, something formulated in the head of another can impact so many people to the point where it becomes yet another parallel forming organically in your mind

6. my mind feels wrung, wrung dry, wrung wet, wrung until it is left throbbing even though there is nothing left of it to capture except for the stream of forms and colors that with each projection split further the shrieking matter of the conflicted mind