Inchoate

Calling this post inchoate runs the risk of it fading further into the obscure whatever of the internet. Firstly, because you probably have to look the word up to know what it means, or you may not even care and just read on regardless, or in the eventuality that you do look it up and you realise what it means, you may still not quite get what I'm key-pressing about. Bear with, or not. Whatever. I'm not even here right now. Imagine this on a post-it on your fridge or vibrating through the plastic grate of your answering machine. This is all pre-recorded, settled in pixels, ripe with the possibility of your understanding and yet you come across and read 'inchoate' - no, you skim past it, it barely registers as a thought because while on the internet, you are vacuumed in. It pulls you past the title. If you were paying close attention, you may actually have read it but not registered what the letters put in that order are signalling. I thought of anchovies, inches I ate. I then looked up this awkward word in the dictionary, and was satisfied.

I'm pleased that I can call this post inchoate. It's a sign of my self-expression, my not knowing what will instantiate on this surface. It's a trace. I was here. Call me back. Post below. Validate my existence. Just pin the comment there and I'll take my blindfold off and clap when I see it. I won't much care what it'll say, to be frank. Jodi Dean says what is on the internet is not just an image but an image and its trace. This isn't live, you know. I'm putting this here so you can see it, but it's after the fact, afterhours. You've reached my shop window and instead of a closed sign there is this post titled inchoate. It's kind of here; like the blinds are down over the window but they're partly open and you can cup your hands and put them around your eyes, kind of like putting your vision in brackets, and you can see through the tint to something; like the tension between the comma and the dot in the semi-colon, the pluralism makes you stop, makes you consider what is here, what is left, who left this here? Well, you know who.

I don't know if you know what I'm talking about. I can't really find out, actually. I reckon I'm saying something, though. I think I'm saying something about the internet and the habit we have as internauts to skim-accept-send information that is expendable, not really a thought, ordurary.

Zoom out, and I think a lot of my own thinking has that character. I don't sit with it, I don't really consider it, I just sort of get a thought and post it, utter something, shock with spontaneity. I write to see my writing be written, to see my key-pushing leave a trail of work so that at the end of the sentence I can punctuate and rub the forehead sweat that I swear was just there a vibration ago.

New Zealand is criticised for being an anti-intellectual environment. I've contributed to that, too. Just writing. Saying what's on the top of my head, taking the impulse gut-feeling as worth more than thought thought, thought that has been ruminated, considered. Literally in Latin, according to the etymology dictionary online, com-sidus could refer to the act of observing the stars. If my mind is a sky, and the thoughts are stars, then the light of them takes a long time to reach from far galaxies and other astral spaces. As time goes on, some stars grow brighter, others dim. I must take my time. No, I want a different analogy, because I feel like if I take my time, I actually don't have enough. Thoughts come and go, but I seem to just pick at the brightest and forget about the ones that have yet to really reach me. I recognise that it may take them a long time to get here... to articulate, but there's only so many constellations I can draw with the same thoughts I have now; there's only so much I can divine from reading this one snapshot of the sky. Reading the same patterns reinforces my anti-intellectual attitude; it makes me resist anything new. These lines that I've drawn don't have to make up a lion, they can make up a notion, a new way of seeing. 

So I wait until the stars glow closer.