(Excerpt from a notebook) On the topic of writing, Bukowski says: If it doesn’t come bursting out of you in spite of everything, don’t do it. There’s no other way, and there never was. I think what he means is that your writing has to be a surprise, even to yourself. Too many people see writing as a form of thinking, when in reality it’s the complete opposite, a mirrored version or maybe a distant relative to it. When you write, when you really write, you do not need to fear the blank page, because it’s not you who are going to fill it, but your words. Sometimes I’m all up in my head, and I only write such things I’ve already thought about. But what then is the point of writing at all? Is it only documentation? I believe, and believe strongly, that the power lies in not knowing how your sentence will end. I believe, and believe strongly, that we have labyrinths in us just waiting to be discovered, but if you always know and see everything, you just walk along a winding path. You miss all the ways you could have gone. True writing is about something like that.
Tag Archives: writing
The Tokyo Project
In a relatively new corner of the world wide web there’s a website called kofi. You could say that it belongs to a group of new websites, some of them not even that new, about crowdfunding and being – through the internet – supported by the very same people who enjoy your work.
Kofi works in the way that you buy someone a coffee, or, technically, you just click a button and 3 bucks are transferred to that person, they can use it however.
I want to use kofi to give away free coffee to people in Shibuya, Tokyo.
In the midst of, or rather right next to, the busiest intersection in the world, there’s a starbucks with a second floor seating area where tourists and locals can enjoy their coffee while looking at the endless stream of people passing by below. I went to Japan last year, and took some time to interview people there, because it’s one of my favourite places I’ve ever been. But this time I wanted to do something different.
I want to connect this virtual reality where everything is buttons and icons, and we sometimes forget that there’s even a person on the other side of the profiles, with the very tangible, physical reality. Don’t get me wrong, there’s beauty in the virtual just as there is in the physical, but it is – above all else – interesting when they meet.
I want someone to be able to sit in front of their computer in America and click a button, and for it to cause me to buy and actual cup of coffee that I’ll give to an actual person out on the street. There’s nothing abstract about that, real cardboard cups and caffeine and money.
This project is a study in two areas I find endlessly fascinating. First of all, different realities versus each other. In this case, the collision and connection of physical and virtual reality. The transformation of something virtual into something “real”. And also the connection and collision between the physical and spiritual. I think acts of generosity change the atmosphere of an area and around a person. And the second area: The great exhange. The way in which we all link up and the constant exhange that is happening, always, whether it comes to money and business or services or compliments. If you’re stingy, no one seems to have enough, but the more generous you are and the more you step into the great exhange, the more you’ll notice it. We’re starting something.
So for now this is just an idea, but when it happens, or well, when I do it, I’ll invite you to virtually give a random person in the Shibuya crossing a fresh cup of coffee.
To the writer who won’t start writing (so, me)
Stop looking for the perfect story and choose a real one. (Your heroine doesn’t need freckles or a specific hair colour and your love interest doesn’t need his eyes described in detail. It would be more interesting hearing your story from the point of a view of a baby. It would be more interesting if everyone wasn’t so morally good. It would be more interesting if you didn’t care so much that you ruined it.)
Tokyo
I’m in Tokyo for three weeks, on outreach with YWAM(!!!!!) It’s insane and crazy and surreal, and so very Japan.
Japan is so Japan. Which sounds stupid, like the way I couldn’t stop talking about how American everything in America was when I first came there. But it’s like my favourite thing in the world. That regardless of globalization and urbanization and communication the houses are different and the sound of the river is different and the wind is different.
(That’s about all I have to say because I haven’t realised I’m actually here yet, but here are some city gifs)
(Good night)
Friday oct 27th
(Journal entry)
Life is so interesting.
I’ve broken down many times, in many ways.
The autumn of my last year in school, I reached a point – several times – where I physically couldn’t do anything but sit in bed and finally ask for help.
On outreach to Kenya I broke down and then did things anyway.
And while working as a teacher I had to, well, quit working as a teacher because of where it brought me.
I keep walking into walls. Running into them in fact, heart first. I think I should learn to hit them with my shoulders instead, so that I don’t break into a million pieces. But I do also think I’ll be the one to tear them down.
(The most important thing about a person)
From the times I couldn’t undo
couldn’t fix
couldn’t stand up again.
From the times I couldn’t win
but only say
One day
one of us will grow tired
and it won’t be me.
From endless days
endless ways
of searching back:
I love you,
said as easy as breathing.
October (already)
(Yesterday, borrowing my roommates car.)
I’ve had too many days
In these last few days
To write about all of them.
I was thinking about it a few weeks ago, when we went to Walmart in the middle of the night to buy things for a friend’s birthday. That’s crazy! It was an adventure, such a day, such a whole day and night to write about. Maybe I’m too excited, or actually I don’t care if I’m too excited, joy belongs to the people too excited. But then the next day something new happened, and I never did write.
My life feels full of those days lately.
(And that’s good. I document things that are rare.)
4th of July
Or: The inevitability of time
Wow, deep right?
See, we didn’t quite have time to finish our ice cream. I was eating my cookie dough extra chocolate chip caramel chocolate sauce deliciousness while stressing out about not stressing, and then suddenly the sky was dark and we were biking along the road as rain started to fall, fireworks going off in the distance. Violent in comparison to soft lights from the restaurants we passed. It was not bad. It was one of my favourite moments of the whole evening. But as we hopped off and stood next to our bikes the sentence ‘The inevitability of time‘ popped into my head.
We just bike alongside that time. Sing with it. Get rained on, messed up, as it flows by like the wind and grabs our hair and hands with the unforgiveness of a ringing bell. The sound of it is breaking my bones from the inside out. I was just supposed to be here for a short time. Last year was the fourth of july I was supposed to experience. Now it’s no longer just a small window or good perspective into a culture that is not mine, but it’s tradition for me too. There will be another fourth of July, and the sun will sink as a countdown until the fireworks start again, if I die, if I live, if I stop caring. It continually exists. Apart from me. Maybe that’s what I’m saying.
Anyway. It was one of those moments when finding a specific set of words and using them to define the moment, the experience, the lesson, made me feel better, calmer, satisfied with existence because it means I am here, I am growing, I am seeing this moment as being something.
(And is it ever something. My heart sings with it, beats with it, and I am just lost enough)
Notes Found
somewhere in the dark corners of my phone:
Everything you make me throw up I swallow right back down again, the wisps of sweet poison to the bitter taste of my fingernails, I swallow it down again. Grasping hands clinging to asphalt and tissue and all the atoms they cannot see, second hand looking and eyes eyes eyes on me. I swallow it right back down again (please) I swallow it right back down again.
From the mountains (unedited)
(A song I sang on a mountain once) I wrote this while hiking and it’s a river of thoughts. I have some idea how to fix it; there are too many concepts, I need to focus it and edit it and maybe I can make it into something actually good. But for now, here’s the river:
But the mountains did not make me quiet.
We are not Steadfast Silent
Do not Remain
(I was more Alive)
We are not mountains
But are we the eruption of a volcanoe?
fire burning, throwing stones, lava sizzling
But no, we as well need to charge
We are not oceans (because we like to go places)
But are we waves?
Crashing and pulsing and beating
No, hearts see hearts and lose rythm
Are we forests
(a million pieces growing and dying)
to get lost in?
But no.
I am not inhabited.
There are no animals here.
No spirits but us.
Everything that I have done has been done by me.
Then
As I stepped on stone
My mind spoke;
Human – Nature
We flow differently through the rivers of time.
We are
Like the flowers
– they gave to me every sunday in a church in Florida –
cut at the base, dying Slower
Our tears (and laughter) are the rivers
making patterns in the landscape Faster
And we are always the ocean
Breathe
Waves rolling in Crashing over our lungs
The air reclaiming it – ocean – as his faster slower faster slower slower
As I walk and as I talk and as I run through the crevices of your soul
There are rivers in me
And fire in me
And mountains in me
eirians 