cogency

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No joke. I did some revision to the second half of “playing for keeps,” which makes it more complementary to “a validating frame of mind,” which has been honed alot. There’s now much more cogency to the road.

My primary interest there is not (yet) accessibility, though most of what I write, I believe, is accessible, with difficult passages. If I were writing to clarify what I’m doing, the clarity would be very evident. But difficult concepts don’t become less difficult, just better understood.

It’s risky writing for my own satisfaction, living without seeking audience. I have to sustain a confidence in my own work, like someone writing a novel, which is very lonely (they say). The effort easily seems willfully self-centric, if not narcissistic. But there’s no other choice, if the work is to get done, than to seem somewhat willfully confident.

It’s not willfulness; it’s fidelity to my own project, ideas, enchantments, whatever—my own, not basically as mine, but as a fidelity to the appeal of the landscape, which easily looks like merely the appeal of my own mind to myself.

Time tells, but only when you venture onto the commons, dressed at last, and ready to go for lastingness.

I’m quite confident I can gain audience when I really want that. But I have a lot of work ahead before I focus on being widely read. I’m somewhat in love with the work, almost as if I don’t want fulfillment, because the pleasure of the approach is so appealing.

When I was a teen, living in a suburban edge to horse farms, I’d hike a lot. Going a way I’d never gone before, topping a hill I’d never topped before, would be a little thrill of seeing to the next hilltop, and I’d ache with knowing I didn’t have time today to do another hilltop, because I had to go back the same distance I’d come, just to get dinner and sleep. The venture was always in a halftime, being doubled to get home.

After all is said and done, I still have to put it all into presentable form—all of the webpages—as a completely different website, everything broken down and reassembled as the singular work. Believe it or not, everything I’m venturing with care are pieces in something that will have very different composition (but same pieces) in the end, like a symphony of little melodies that found variation among the themes, movements and interludes, but altogether singular somehow.