Non-Doing
Monday, February 16, 2004
Dress Randomly
No, don't look at that variety that pushes out the closet, because as long as your eyes are open, you will see your clothes in habitually matching outfits and won't be able to go past the inherent order you had accorded them to. Instead, close your eyes and pull whatever comes first into your grip. Then again, and again.
If anything you pulled out seems or feels okay, put it back and find an item that is bothersomly uncoordinated to the rest of the pieces. Remember, the point is to feel uneasy, not yourself, confused. Mix winter and summer materials, shiny and cotton, slick and hippy in ways that defy any fashion, any visual or tactile sense whatsoever, especially yours.
Put your new creation on and go about your daily chores as usual. Perhaps, to get comfortable in your new skin, you should move around the house until the folds have settled in and your body has calmed down its initial indignation. Then venture into the vast world and shovel your embarrassment away, where all unnecessary feelings belong, in the nothingness. Enrich the nothingness we so neglect with yet another gift of demolished somethingness.
Tuesday, January 06, 2004
Saturday, January 03, 2004
Write Unintelligible Texts
Glonfegjsl uijm than dlengich zum. Tlagma sino utramin frant bej ogama davujesta uijm. Flagna tlagma kaboje ibnum straj.
Or without even phonetic rhythm:
Thsydiondjs gshtifos nkjsdlotf hj ndyhth m, masai hsaa. Mjsla hrtid jasi jt kLnekelw - jsk djksabn. Tshja FEW DHSJAO fhdjsla.
This way you can watch as the letters come out on the screen (or the page) and arrange them visually as opposed to phonetically.
If you really want to bring your epistolary nothingness to higher levels, you can try writing with a dry pen so that no ink marks the route of your thoughts. This way you can have a choice of writing your usual thoughts, a poem, a short story or anything that would convey some kind of sense, or you may choose to write unintelligible material as the one examplified above. Either way there will be no trace of the process, regardless how mindless or how laborious it could have been.
Writing for the sake of writing is a multiple layer experience where you can trace the process from phoneme to symbol to sentence without tainting it with expectations of literary grandeur, mnemonic efficiency or fears of intimate disclosure. Just savour the abstract act of rendering meaning or defying it. Happy writing!
Change Routes
Today you may consider breaking your habitual trajectories. Do you get up and go straight to the bathroom? Why not try the kitchen first, or even the exit door or the closet. Apart from challenging the utilitarian connotations of an efficient bed-bathroom route, you can discover hidden benefits to taking your clothes to the bathroom before taking a shower to emerge fully packed and ready to go from your own private temple of hyegene. Or perhaps taking a bite in the kitchen before brushing your teeth makes a little more sense than mindlessly doing the opposite every single day. Conversely, if your first morning instinct is to reach to the fridge, why not try the bathroom first and then savour the taste of food without the tint of morning breath.
Going to work may be a set deal - you know the fastest route and will be there in exactly 14 minutes and 35 seconds. Why don't you take a detour that would round up the time to 15 minutes. Suprise your colleagues - be on time or be late for once, explore your neighbourhood, break the straight line of your commuting routine, use any means of transportation you usually avoid. Perhaps you'll meet your destiny on the train or merely enjoy a different scenerey, or have an argument with a woman in a yellow coat and discover your talent for spontaneous conflict. Whatever it is, it'll be different from what you already know enough to take for granted.
At your lunch break, in your office, on your way back - don't forget to sabottage your commuting habits. Why do you pass through that corridor to reach the kitchen at work? Why do you go to lunch through the friont door - use the back one. Don't get straight back home, make a detour, discover the little decoration store in your neighbourhood that sells things you would never need for a fraction of the designer's cost. Get off one stop earlier and walk home, juts feeling the breeze on your face and listening to the traffic symphony coming from the adjacent highway.
And even if your different routes slow down your regular pace to a socially dangerous degree, remember the proverb that whoever hurries gets there slowly and the longest route is sometimes the shortest. But even better, don't remember anything - do it just for the heck of it, for the experience of being alive and savouring a new detail of the enormity out there.
Friday, January 02, 2004
The Beginning That Could Go Anywhere
Doing in non-doing and non-doing in doing have been recurring themes in ancient texts determined to light up our short path to the inevitable end defining our default state of mortality. From the wise sayings of Lao Tze to the divine revelations of Bhagavad Gita, we have been incessantly yet gently instructed to just relax and count our hairs for a change. Because counting hairs is a painless way to divert the neurotic attention of those who find it hard to simply do nothing from the goal-oriented achievement-driven semantically saturated dictatorship of things. Moreover, follicle accounting is one of the innumerable little tricks one can resort to when direct gazing into nothingness seems a task as insurmountable as Kant would try to suggest. The following pages will render a step by step lateral approach to doing that would ideally disprove Kant's pessimistic theories and practically lead you on to reach the elusive nowhere.
