Aolist
03-05-2006, 09:50 PM
Have you ever felt it?
Perhaps during a time of emotional turbulence.
Or maybe when you didn't feel anything at all.
Or when you were walking along...
It hits you. The urge. It swims about your mind, and the distinct feeling of inspiration begins to pull at your thoughts. Soon it crushes the senses in an onslaught of waves and it surges through your entire body, to your very soul.
With this fervent ardor you sit down with pen in hand and your thoughts rush out in arbitrary black squibbles. You write and write until the joints of your forefinger and thumb ache with pain, and this pain starts to spread to the rest of your hand but you continue to write, numb to the physical world. The hours tick by, but of course you don't realize it; you are drowned in this need to write.
You are finished your masterpiece. You raise your head, the unfamiliar surroundings coming into focus. You take a breath of air and release a weighty sigh of relief, as if you've just struggled ashore from the grasps of the ocean.
You look over your writing with pride and curiosity. You read it over and admire how you worded that sentence and you correct a few errors but overall you are more than satisfied with the piece. You tuck the piece of your mind into a folder, or perhaps you wrote it in a diary.
You reflect on the message you had. You like that message. It is your message. And in the darker crevices of your mind you wonder if your message resonates with another like-minded individual out there. You think of all your friends and your mentors and your relatives and feel that no one would truly appreciate your writing on the level you intended it to be. Or perhaps they would misread it or analyze the grammar. Ultimately you feel that your writing is exiled to your journal until some archaeologist unearths it millennia later and in a fit of inspiration upon reading the entry writes his own masterpiece.
And then you feel the definitive sense of futility in writing without an audience. After all, writings are intended to be read. Without readers, what are writers?
And so you come here.
Here, on this forum, there are readers. And in this subforum, those readers are also writers, who post their writings to readers in the mass. Here, obscure trinkets of esoteric minds—formerly kept in the dark recesses of buried computer files, or in buried paper files, without the proper audience—come to light online, where the audience of anonymous thousands lies at the mere click of a mouse.
All that said, I’d like to offer a brief synopsis of what I envision this thread to be.
I’d like this thread to be a collection of writings (of any kind, e.g. essays, short stories, journal/diary entries, poems etc.) that were written with passion or in the rapture of inspiration. Writings that you just wrote because you felt you HAD to; it was a necessity. Perhaps you just had an experience with death of an ant (or an aunt) and you wrote a musing on life. Post it. And we’ll read it and discuss.
That’s where everything comes together: discussion. You see, I recently realized that there is a certain futility in doing things alone. It’s when people come together that life really begins. Discussion is going to be the life of this thread. Without discussion, this thread will fade away. Even if just one person submits a work, we could discuss it for years. But if a thousand people submit and no one discusses, then you might as well not post and put that work back into is folder.
At this point, go ahead and post thoughts about the thread idea or works of your own, and you can read mine afterwards, if you’d like.
Perhaps during a time of emotional turbulence.
Or maybe when you didn't feel anything at all.
Or when you were walking along...
It hits you. The urge. It swims about your mind, and the distinct feeling of inspiration begins to pull at your thoughts. Soon it crushes the senses in an onslaught of waves and it surges through your entire body, to your very soul.
With this fervent ardor you sit down with pen in hand and your thoughts rush out in arbitrary black squibbles. You write and write until the joints of your forefinger and thumb ache with pain, and this pain starts to spread to the rest of your hand but you continue to write, numb to the physical world. The hours tick by, but of course you don't realize it; you are drowned in this need to write.
You are finished your masterpiece. You raise your head, the unfamiliar surroundings coming into focus. You take a breath of air and release a weighty sigh of relief, as if you've just struggled ashore from the grasps of the ocean.
You look over your writing with pride and curiosity. You read it over and admire how you worded that sentence and you correct a few errors but overall you are more than satisfied with the piece. You tuck the piece of your mind into a folder, or perhaps you wrote it in a diary.
You reflect on the message you had. You like that message. It is your message. And in the darker crevices of your mind you wonder if your message resonates with another like-minded individual out there. You think of all your friends and your mentors and your relatives and feel that no one would truly appreciate your writing on the level you intended it to be. Or perhaps they would misread it or analyze the grammar. Ultimately you feel that your writing is exiled to your journal until some archaeologist unearths it millennia later and in a fit of inspiration upon reading the entry writes his own masterpiece.
And then you feel the definitive sense of futility in writing without an audience. After all, writings are intended to be read. Without readers, what are writers?
And so you come here.
Here, on this forum, there are readers. And in this subforum, those readers are also writers, who post their writings to readers in the mass. Here, obscure trinkets of esoteric minds—formerly kept in the dark recesses of buried computer files, or in buried paper files, without the proper audience—come to light online, where the audience of anonymous thousands lies at the mere click of a mouse.
All that said, I’d like to offer a brief synopsis of what I envision this thread to be.
I’d like this thread to be a collection of writings (of any kind, e.g. essays, short stories, journal/diary entries, poems etc.) that were written with passion or in the rapture of inspiration. Writings that you just wrote because you felt you HAD to; it was a necessity. Perhaps you just had an experience with death of an ant (or an aunt) and you wrote a musing on life. Post it. And we’ll read it and discuss.
That’s where everything comes together: discussion. You see, I recently realized that there is a certain futility in doing things alone. It’s when people come together that life really begins. Discussion is going to be the life of this thread. Without discussion, this thread will fade away. Even if just one person submits a work, we could discuss it for years. But if a thousand people submit and no one discusses, then you might as well not post and put that work back into is folder.
At this point, go ahead and post thoughts about the thread idea or works of your own, and you can read mine afterwards, if you’d like.