It's been a while. I have writer's block (the ultimate first world disease) and I think it's because my throat chakra is closed. My heart chakra is also closed. This means that I can't communicate and I can't love. I have been told that I need to meditate while making my hands into certain positions (called "mudras") and chant YAM and HAM for the heart and throat respectively. The rest of what I know about chakras comes from watching the animated show "Avatar, The Last Airbender," which is probably not a good way to learn about Eastern metaphysics. But since these chakras are blocked, I am physically incapable of expressing myself. The last real post was such an effort that I patted myself on the back and felt like I would never have to post again, ever. I would like to say I have been distracted by other projects, but so far all I have been putting any serious effort into is a project with the working title of "Gilgamesh, Part II," which will some day be my ticket out of this shitty Ozone Shack and into an Ozone Mansion with Ozone Butlers and a swimming pool filled with ozone. (This will soon turn into a swimming pool filled with asthma.)
A flaw of our educational system is that we no longer know how to write. When they teach you to write they are actually instilling inside you a cancer that will slowly destroy your ability to write correctly.
The way we are taught in schools makes writing a process. I was told that an essay needed five paragraphs, each with its own kind of structure. The key piece of this process was a single sentence they called the thesis, which represented just that, a single sentence, not an idea to be communicated. Of course, the essay was meant to revolve around this thesis, but we had no real idea what a thesis actually was, other than a rather long and awkward-sounding sentence that usually had to begin with "however" or "although" and ended with three enumerated reasons on why dogs were better than cats, then later in our educational careers evolving to why Andrew Jackson shouldn't have forced the Cherokee to relocate, and then how some romantic poet uses three high school English class buzzwords to prove his point.
From there you would fill out the template. Start with a vague and general sentence, and three or four increasingly specific sentences later you get to that contrived thesis. Then you have three paragraphs, each stemming from that three headed monster of a thesis, alternating between sentences that are fact and sentences that are commentary. They were sentences that were by themselves, no regard was paid to the sentences around them, and no regard was even paid to what the sentences actually sounded like. They were just sloppy regurgitations of information and formulaic ways of making connections. After a few paragraphs of this tedium your even more awkwardly restate your awkward thesis, then gradually get more general, capitulating it with a lame generalization about how this particular topic affects everything else in the world today.
And you haven't learned to do anything but hide your thoughts from yourself and from others. This teaches us that writing is a task or a formula, and not a way to communicate. It was an epiphany of sorts when I realized that writing could be more than just that kind of process, that it was actually a richly intensive form of communication.
Writing is speaking with your hands, it's speaking that's not bound by time.
And our generation does not know how to write because we have learned the technical aspects before any of the governing ideas. I can blame many reasons as to why this must be but certainly can't offer very many constructive solutions; such is the condition of a young idealist. But I do know that aspects of the problem lie in the overemphasis on standardized testing, and the belief that a bottom-up approach will somehow be able to instill a respect for and understanding of the power writing holds.
I am convinced that there are only two requirements to writing well. The more specific, technical aspects will take care of themselves. These rules are:
- Have something to say.
- Say it in such a way that people will want to listen.
Anything else your high school English teacher taught you was superfluous. (Note: I do not intend to offend the illustrious Mr. Dan Doyle. I was under his tutelage long after I had realized these two rules, and he taught me a great many things, the most notable of which was that the Allman Brother's Eat a Peach was not exactly about getting your five servings of fruit, unless of course by "five servings of fruit" you actually mean "five servings of pussy.")
