Excuse me from my schizophrenic ramblings…

Excuse me from my schizophrenic ramblings for a moment, I actually have something that may be insightful to say for once.

Once upon a time I was an avid reader, reading two or three heavy novels at a time, constantly engaged by articles and the innevitable critique of them that follows, and even a sometime dabbler in magazine print, arguably one of the lowest forms of literature available. While the advent of the global internet has indeed changed some of my infovorous habits, I find that I read much less, and it isn’t just at all because of the three-second attention span that has many firmly in its grasp which we tend to attribute to television and the internet.

I have no hunger for words.

The answer lies in the evolution of my writing style.
Once upon a time when I wrote under the moniker Anakha, stolen from David Eddings, my writing style was perhaps typical of the young writer; entries that struggled to pull imagery from all walks of culture in order to present an idea or atmosphere. It was much of the time a great struggle, and I would heap ideas on top of one-another until hopefully I created something that resembled what I wanted to express.
Seven years of writing later, and I have become an extreme minimalist. Over the years I have been learning that I am able to express myself more by saying less, perhaps like photography, by saying as much by exclusion as by inclusion, an amazing phenomenon I did not fully understand until recently. This has really shortened my patience for much of the literature there is available to me. Today I tried to surf through a newspaper’s website and chose an opinion article out of curiosity. After the first paragraph I gave up. It wasn’t that the article was poorly written, or even uninteresting – on the contrary, it most likely is an excellent piece of writting on a relevant and important subject; but for me it had no life.
For me, almost all writing has no life, and yes, that is the conceit of the writer. It sounds like elitism, but is only half so. I don’t consider my writing to be better than general literature per-se, but to be more attuned to my own expressions.

I don’t want words, I want moments.

Recently I had a conversation with Lost Horizon, a fellow writer here on Open diary, and one of the oldest ones in the community, that I enjoy writing moments. I love capturing often singular, often subtle but incredibly intimate moments between characters, or even between one character and the environment in which he or she inhabits. My life is made up of these moments, I express myself through them. Everything else seems to be excess – religion, politics, the daily grind of trouble in the news, the flamboyance of sports – it’s meaningless. While yes, my language has definitely developed through my own use of it and my encounters and exposure to literature, I feel I’ve come to a point where I’ve so finely developed my own dialect that I cannot manufacture interest in anyone else’, particularly that of the journalistic world. I have become fluent in this minimalist dialect, but not only strictly in the use of words and expressions, the physical construction and excecution of it, I’ve become fluent in the memes that give it meaning, that give it the life it needs to be relevant to me.

I realise that in my life I engage myself by translating everything into this dialect, it is one of my foremost processes in my daily life. How much I am engaged by something to a greater or lesser degree, often depends on how readily the event or interaction can be so translated. When it comes to literature, we are dealing with any number of dialects, and many of them I simply don’t speak. That doesn’t mean I can’t decipher any meaning from the articles or literature, it means I don’t connect with it on any emotional level. Perhaps that is why I still find encyclopedias and scientific studies easier to read than articles and works of fiction.

I have more to say, but will stop here – the voices are calling.