Alter Ego

Stuck on a boat listening to Disney tunage on a loop sounds horrific! I very often re read something I've scrawled and I'm like, 'Huh' *shrug. Zero concious thought of what I was writing. Weird? Lots to think about! Most excellent Just, 'J' 😁 Loved this! 🤍

Impetuous Alter-Ego, "going along for the ride?" I see that side. I lived that side one time long ago, too. Had fun, but there were consequences. lol "I never learn anything by just listening to myself" I suppose I have the gift of Gemini in my introverted self because there's always two of me to spar with in life. I believe you are pretty well-integrated with your alter side, too. You seem balanced in your thoughts and provoke others to see another side, as well. Loved the parts about dreaming...the body is still, but the brain still demands attention like it does oxygen. And of course, animals love both sides of their silly humans. They are the ones to listen to!

Thank you! I have this ability too, even though it disappeared for a couple of weeks! I think the artist is great as well!!😊💕

Excellent take on creativity. Happy to subscribe to your work.

Ok. Who wrote this, I bet it was your twin, not the twin twin, but the other twin. The one hiding below the surface. I have dreamed some of my stories, trouble is I mostly forget a half of it. Both sides of you are fascinating. Just keep doing your shtick. What amazing artworks you feature my fellow vocalite. So jealous.

I love the artwork for your stories

Our work lives through us just as we live through the work. Makes me think of Hermann Hesse's "Steppenwolf", at the end, when Mozart comes to him in a dream. I wrote a stream-of-consciousness essay about the book, a comparison of my readings at 25 and 40 years old. I couldn't, in the end, agree with what Hesse tried to say through Mozart's dream-mouth, but I still love the sentiment. "Second, the final conversation Harry has with Mozart. Mozart brings a radio and sets it up. He plays Handel through it and Harry asks him why he should want to afflict the both of them by playing this beautiful music through this inadequate instrument. Mozart’s reply: "Please, no pathos, my friend! Anyway, did you observe the ritardando? An inspiration, eh? Yes, and now you tolerant man, let the sense of this ritardando touch you. Do you hear the basses? They stride like gods. And let this inspiration of old Handel penetrate your restless heart and give it peace. Just listen, you poor creature, listen without either pathos or mockery, while far away behind the veil of this hopelessly idiotic and ridiculous apparatus the form of this divine music passes by. Pay attention and you will learn something. Observe how this crazy funnel apparently does the most stupid, the most useless and the most damnable thing in the world. It takes hold of some music played where you please, without distinction, stupid and coarse, lamentably distorted, to boot, and chucks it into space to land where it has no business to be; and yet after all this it cannot destroy the original spirit of the music; it can only demonstrate its own senseless mechanism, its inane meddling and marring. Listen, then, you poor thing. Listen well. You have need of it. And now you hear not only a Handel who, disfigured by radio, is, all the same, in this most ghastly of disguises still divine; you hear as well and you observe, most worthy sir, a most admirable symbol of all life. When you listen to radio you are a witness of the everlasting war between idea and appearance, between time and eternity, between the human and the divine. Exactly, my dear sir, as the radio for ten minutes together projects the most lovely music without regard into the most impossible places, into respectable drawing rooms and attics and into the midst of chattering, guzzling, yawning and sleeping listeners, and exactly as it strips the music of its sensuous beauty, spoils and scratches and be-slimes it and yet cannot altogether destroy its spirit, just so does life, the so-called reality, deal with the sublime picture-play of the world and make a hurley-burley of it. It makes its unappetizing tone—slime of the most magic orchestral music. Everywhere it obtrudes its mechanism, its activity, its dreary exigencies and vanity between the ideal and the real, between orchestra and ear. All life is so, my child, and we must let it be so; and, if we are not asses, laugh at it." We can now extend and update this analogy to the modern day. Recorded music has become almost pristine, so pristine in its reproduction of the real thing that the digital machine can produce tones and melodies more exact than the human one ever could. Yet the music we often choose to produce with this miracle of modern technology doesn’t reach, or even aspire, to a small fraction of the genius of a Handel or Mozart, and for no other reason than that the majority of people do not want to hear it." The whole essay is here: https://thedecadentreview.com/corpus/thoughts-on-steppenwolf/

You described "the writing experience" beautifully! I've told people that sometimes when I'm writing stories, I'm "just following the characters around"! And my characters often take off on a path I swear I never would have thought of! I've also picked up an old story I wrote years ago, begin reading it, thinking to myself, "not bad...who wrote this?"...and it was ME! Very weird and wonderful to have that creative spark taking over your brain waves, huh? Great analysis you wrote!

Mind-bending. Moving from one stream of thought through another, like a rapids through a twisting canyon. I don't know if this is the way you intended this piece to be read, but I can't seem to get away from reading it at a fractured frenetic pace, as though hearing Max Headroom reading it out loud. Whether that's by design or not, let me tell you, it's one heck of a ride! That was fun!