One of my ljfriends (final girl) recently asked people why they write. The answers were fascinating. It got me thinking about it. Recently I started reading Watts' "The Way of Zen" -- which is great, very deep and yet easy to understand (I spend 20 minutes on each page to try to grasp it all)-- I read something that struck a chord. It really seemed to summarize why I, me, personally, write and what I'm trying for.

He writes: "Taoism concerns itself with unconventional knowledge, with the understanding of life directly, instead of in the abstract, linear terms of representational thinking...To understand what Taoism is about, we must at least be prepared to admit the possibility of some view of the world other than the conventional (scientific and rational), some knowledge other than the contents of our surface consciousness, which can apprehend reality only in the form of one abstract thought at time. There is no real difficulty in this, for we already admit that we "know" how to move our hands, how to make a decision, or how to breathe, even though we can hardly begin to explain how we do it in words. We know how to do it because we just do it! Taoism is an extension of this kind of knowledge, an extension which gives us a very different view of ourselves from that to which we are conventionally accustomed."

His point is that Taoism is an attempt to escape the conventional thinking mind and conventional forms of conscious, linear thinking, and to be introduced to a new form of experience.

This is what I'm trying to do (for myself) with my writing, to constantly push the limits of the rational and linear, and to be filled with the happiness of word and image "accidents". I'm trying to discover a new way of speaking, to myself.