not only is it tremendously time consuming but perhaps not all that fulfilling....
In her coming book, "Alone Together"....
wasn't merely a distraction, but it was really confusing him about who he was....

"Alone Together". Post-industrial living. Awful. But people do still desire some aspects of how they once lived. A world where there was far more face to face interaction. Where your house wasn't a fortress and you didn't even know your neighbors. Where instead there was some meaningful connection and you interacted on a daily basis with the people whom live around you. A world where you felt connected to both nature and other people. Facebook and some other things online reveal this desire in people to have such a connection with others. But trying to get it there is like already being dead.

But, it's a good way to keep in touch with all the people that don't live close?

Industrialized society again. Always moving. And walled away in your fortress. TV, internet, car, no one you work with even lives anywhere near you.

What reason is there for me to speak to anyone ever?

Go to work. Slap on a smile. Go home. I don't exist.

...Van Gogh's unoccupired chairs pay respect to a tendency to avoid represtentation of the human figure. Gauguin is there, seated in his armchair, even if we cannot see him - according to this formula.

The breat in the two artists' friendship had become inevitable. When Gauguin decided to leave, he left the ruins of van Gogh's dreams of an artists' community in the South behind. "As you know, I have always considered it idiotic that painters live alone. It is always a loss if one is left to one's own devices", van Gogh had written to his brother, describing his longing for solidarity amongst painters.

"....sooner there will be nothing left... but empty chairs."

"In the 19th century there was an altogether new type of suffering artist: the lonely, lost, despairing artist on the brink of insanity...

"The 19th century was the inhuman century par excellence; the triumph of technology mechanized our lives totally, rendering us stupid; the worship of Mammon has irredemably impoverished mankind, without exception; and a world without God is not only the least moral but als othe least comfortable that can be conceived. As he enters the Present, modern man reaches the inmost circle of hell along his absurd and necessary path of suffering."- Egon Friedell

It requires the author to be "dismissed," once and for all, so as finally to come into existence, to be, to "assert itself as thing without author and without reader." What Blanchot dismisses here, with an irrevocable gesture, is not just the author, but the mirage – so stubborn, though – of a “communication” between the writer and the reader. The writer is alone, irremediably alone ("Khalvat dar anjoman, solitude in the crowd," posits one of the eleven rules of the Naqshbandi Sufis: that is the solitude of Kafka, again, never alone enough and yet always infinitely alone). Vain hope of writing with a wish to be understood, or of establishing any kind of human fraternity with the other; cruel disillusion of anyone who writes with the expectation of a response, an echo. The writer writes as Giacometti wanted to sculpt: so as to bury the sculpture (as Genet tells us), and "not so that it could be discovered, or else much later, when he himself and the memory of his name have disappeared. Would burying it be to offer it to the dead?" wonders Genet, thus putting his finger on this obvious fact: the writer, the artist does not communicate with the reader or the spectator, he communicates with death; the death of others (Foucault) or else his own death, always yet to come but beyond which he necessarily situates himself in order to write. The writer: the one who is always already dead. The reader, on the contrary, lives, and thanks to him the book, "unburdened of its author," lives too: the book, the text leaves the world of the dead, whence it comes (or comes forth rather?) to participate in the things of life. And that is how the noli me legere of the book gives way to the Lazare, veni foras of the reader, the reader who nonetheless, unlike Christ, accomplishes no miracle, but simply, by his free and innocent reading, his "light yes" offered with a smile, shows (and sees) that language too lives, with its own life.

http://this-space.blogspot.com/2009/02/reading-by-jonathan-littell.html

Hmmm, what was it I was thinking? Oh, no. I was thinking of personally thinking of every story told from the point of view of it being a hell. Secretively or openly. This doesn't necessarily mean pitchforks and lots of screaming. More like how Sartre's Hell is Other People play wasn't really any more or less a hell than the average story really. And was better than lots of people's actual lives.

Was a way to get beyond my issues with not liking pitting people against one another. Writing as if already dead is something else entirely. But perhaps useful.

Right this moment is an actual moment to spend writing. I've had a back issue where sleeping is causing my back to hurt. I went to bed early tonight (9pm), by morning I've no choice but to get up because my back is hurting and getting up (so far) has made the pain stop. Today though it started hurting too bad at 3AM.

But I don't feel quite sufficiently dead enough to really write.

----

http://www.strindbergandhelium.com/
I'm a sort of Strindberg. Although nowhere near like I appear here actually. But still...

I'm very lucky in that my wife is a sort of Helium. Very lucky all around in the wife I have.