Like Proust be an old teahead of time

This made me smile. It's Jack Kerouac's list of 30 'essentials' for writing in his signature style known as spontaneous prose:

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside your own house
4. Be in love with your life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yrself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

I also rather like this oft-quoted passage from his novel On the Road:

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars, and in the middle, you see the blue center-light pop, and everybody goes ahh...

Oh, would that I could afford to support worthy writers!

"Some years ago I copied into my notebook an aphorism from a Russian writer called V.V. Rozanov: 'All religions will pass, but this will remain: simply sitting in a chair and looking in the distance.' ...It is in the nature of humans to do this; in us, life has started to ask questions about itself.

"...The folly of subjecting the religious passion to the politics of power is that it cannot be controlled in this way and refuses to be subject to external direction. I suspect that this is what the writer and film-maker Dennis Potter had in mind when he said just before his death: 'Religion to me has always been the wound not the bandage.' This is a particularly difficult statement for religious officials to live with, especially if they work for religions of salvation. By definition, religions of salvation are in the bandage business; they have come to heal our wounds. They do not sit alongside us in the chair looking in the distance, comparing points of view; they want to protect us from what we might discover for ourselves, by telling us what the official view is and how dangerous it will be for us if we do not accept it. Or, to mix the metaphor slightly, they want to sell us their special spectacles, which have been theologically tested by experts to give us maximum power for long-distance looking."

That's the opening to former-Bishop Richard Holloway's book Doubts and Loves: What is Left of Christianity. Which I wants. Along with the rest of his swag of publications, with names like Godless Morality: Keeping Religion out of Ethics. I am heartened by the discovery of his existence. It's always nice when you come across a book that gets you excited after reading the contents page and skimming the index.

Oh Katherine, you're so earnest. Meh.

Here's the article that brought him to my attention.

I have no idea if the following is 'correct' but it's extremely interesting

"The sensation of floating out of one's body can be traced to another brain region in the parietal lobe called the right angular gyrus, which is essential for locating ourselves in space... Out-of-body experiences naturally occur when activity in the right angular gyrus is suppressed for any reason, Blanke says. When people are in shock, say after an accident, a relative lack of blood flow to this region can easily produce sensations of floating outside one's body.

Finally, the right hemisphere contains circuits for recognizing and feeling the self. Imaging experiments show that three regions -- the medial prefrontal cortex, precuneu, and posterior cingulate cortex -- light up in imaging studies when subjects think about themselves, their hopes, and aspirations and retrieve episodic memories related to their lives. The sense of being -- me, myself, and I -- is located in this circuit, according Dr. Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. When the circuit is suppressed with a device called a transcranial magnet, people can no longer recognize themselves in a mirror, he says."

Sandra Blakeslee discusses the neurophysiology of spiritual experiences. She also touches on the reasons why humans have these experiences while other animals don't, and discusses the bodily grounding of emotion.

I was a bit scared the article would just leave me cynical about spirituality, but I think it's enhanced it for me in some ways.

Shit

I just realised a massive and, one might think, pretty obvious contradiction in my current attitude towards God and religion.

Following on from the previous post, I was thinking about how that song made me feel silly for not believing, and my response is a very defensive one obviously: I don't want to be emotionally manipulated into believing (i.e. believing in a God - not as a means to salvation or whatever but just as something that it would be pleasant to have settled in my mind). If I 'come back' to theism, I don't want it to be because I was shamed into it. I want it to be because... well... what?

Because I choose to come back? But that makes it quite an arbitrary decision, and that's not good enough. I want to believe something because it is true.

But at the same time, I don't want to be forced to believe something. Feeling that I have no choice stirs up my rebellious side. Makes me want to look for ways to make trouble.

Well, if I won't choose, and I won't be forced, and I won't be dragged by the heart, what would it take for me to come back? My position is unfalsifiable. Which means it's no longer about truth; it's about an agenda.

Shit.

(actually I'm pretty sure there's some very bad philosophy in there. i'm getting content mixed up with form, and it's basically a shambles. oh well; it has a certain aesthetic value so i'll let it stand before i pull it apart.)