Saturday, December 6, 2014

Stop Reading

Very few people know it, but the secret to great writing is: not reading. 

Once I was an ordinary boy child of indeterminate gender, like Pinocchio, but powerful poems transformed me, first, into Leto Atreides, God Emperor of Dune, and, second, into G. W. F. Hegel, author of Phenomenology of Spirit and Cranium Base Alpha for touchdown of Absolute Spirit on planet earth in Prussia. 

The way I achieved this was based on the simple principle of not reading. I started by avoiding all works of German Idealism, my own included, then proceeded each day to gradually taper my literacy, cutting out anything in the Continental tradition, works of poetry and philosophy, literary and historical works written more than 50 years ago, then any contemporary 'scholarship' or 'criticism,' anything with an empirical, analytical, or evaluative bent, works of genre fiction, pulp novels, the newspaper, comic books, instructions, and signs. 

I got stuck at this phase for quite some time, and it wasn't until I had a breakthrough based on the mystical experience of Nature that I was able to make progress. When I was walking in the woods, a squirrel fell on my head and it occurred to me that I was STILL thinking like a critic, infected with the disease of abstraction and self-examination: I needed to be like the squirrels, the trees, the organic poem that is Nature. 

From that point on I radically reconceived the my task. The only way to eliminate the stubborn dregs of reading that persisted, boil-like, to plague me--the way to fulfill my destiny and become a fully actualized poetic genius and/or godhead and/or Voice of the Ages and/or independently wealthy auteur--was to tear the weed out by its roots, as it were. 

To eliminate reading, I must eliminate thinking. 

To that effect, I immediately instituted drastic changes in the routines of my daily life. I stopped bathing. I stopped wearing clothes. I refused to cook my food. I defecated at will. At long last, the Mystery of Poetry had revealed itself to me, unlocked in the primitive glory of my transformation. An unspeakable, trembling destiny took shape within me, and I, Leto Atreides the 47th, became God Emperor of Dune, also known as the Poet Lee Sharks. My powerful mind control poems now allowed me to regulate the flow of melange on Dune, and also to become a gigantic worm-man, and also to harness the power of friendship, kindness, laughter, and magic. 

And it all started with not reading.

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