Tribute

[I added this link because I felt bad about the poor quality of the following and I wanted to share some writing that was really personal and really good. It is an essay with photos about the part of life lived on the internet.]

So the other day I wanted to write up a story that I was thinking about the previous week. It was about listening and talking and love and asking questions, it was going to be in third person, maybe mainly through dialogue, I don't know. I couldn't write it, or I didn't anyway. There was something in it that was a mood that I had been in when I thought of it, and I wasn't in that mood any more, I was in quite a different mood. What do you think that says?

Is writing like acting, is it about accurately recreating moods, experiences, feelings that you don't actually have right then? Is that what acting's about? And of course actors have different ways of doing that. There's a short story around that I've seen mentioned a couple of times, called "The Method," that (I haven't read it) seems to be about a method writer: like a method actor, you know? I guess it's just another way of saying I want to have an interesting life so I can write about it. You have to actually write that down before you realise how wrong it sounds.

But maybe I am something like a method writer, which is also like an excuse for saying that I couldn't write this story when I wasn't in that mood. Or maybe I'm too harsh on myself here: maybe it's just that I was in a new mood that was very strong, which was brought on by an event. It seemed to colour everything I did. I read some articles and maybe poems and I found them terribly affecting (although it appears that I can hardly remember them now). I was listening to the Carter Family all day, and it seemed wonderful to me, and melancholy, and longing: it seemed like my mood.

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In my red book I have an outline for something, for this post, that I cannot now seem to write. Not right now. I'll transcribe some of the notes:

ambivalence of mood in music (lyrical music); construction of mood; wise music, art/vision, memory, smell, food [senses] // happy/sweet{melancholy} - love; (choice of something over happiness) - refusal of blissful ignorance - what about fearful ignorance? // loss, separateness - God / religion - love with promise of completion/eternity // reversed kind of love