March 2nd 2015

No Input: Media Fast

Are there literate people out there that just don’t read books? Maybe never have? How about someone who doesn’t listen to music? Yes there are. What a frightening thought that people like that exist! And even more frightening is that I may be outnumbered by those types! I’m a few days into a “no input” vow and it’s always totally weird. I try to do this every now and again. The parameters are: No conscious ingestion of extraneous information. No music, no reading, no watching movies, no reading the news. I just want to give all the informational clutter in my head time to settle into place, leave, or get eaten by a higher function. I’m three days in. I can easily go all day with no music or reading, but the first night usually makes me want to freak out. The second was just odd, slightly boring and sad, and a little lost. Now it’s the third and silence is what it should be, comforting, and rejuvenating. The other dynamic to this process, and perhaps the more important part, is that I’m focusing on output. Art, music, and writing. I feel like I’m living someone else’ life, or actually many other people’s lives by constantly absorbing myself into somebody else’ fiction. Be it the mood of a song or the world created in a book, it is a foreign realm with thoughts and feelings that are not mine (which do have their purpose). External influence rather than internal impetus. The disconnect I often feel with myself is partly from not writing and thinking enough, which leads to the common blockage of creative flow. I constantly bombard myself with external sounds, words, and images which is most definitely a grand distraction from what sounds, words, and images I might be having on my own. I do keep a fairly good output of art and music but that’s just because its routine. We all know that quantity is quite different from quality. I create out of habit, which is a good way to be, but I really need to focus my intentions. I fill almost all my time listening to music, and with any spare moment I instinctively turn to reading. I’m pretty much a news and research junkie, an input junkie overall. I’m endlessly curious. I delve into any subject that I find the slightest bit interesting and learn what i can, like fodder for thoughts. But its an addiction for sure. I look around the room at all the books and get excited about them. Reading is one of the few things I really want to spend my time doing. It would be slightly Ok if my retention was higher. But it really just ends up being a time filler and distraction. I’ll bet my retention level is like 10%. It can’t be much. It’s such a cluttered crowded mess in there that it either doesn’t go in or it’s lost in the mess. I actually read and listen to music at the same time quite frequently. That’s a lot of convoluted processing going on. What a clusterfuck for a mind that wants to think its own thoughts, and create its own art and devices. One facet of brains, and information and clutter that I wont really get into, even though it plays a large part in this topic, is processing. If I were to process all of this information properly it wouldn’t become such a mess in my mind and psyche. I rarely allow myself ample time daily to reflect on what I have absorbed or learned. My subconscious during the dream state can only do so much. Meditation is so necessary. It’s sort of difficult for me to truly realize that time spent doing ‘nothing’ can actually be productive time!

When I think about not reading or listening to music for a week or so it seems a bit senseless and ridiculous. The cluster of info clogging my brain will take way longer than a week to settle, and music and books make me feel good. Key word “makes”. We truly are what we eat. Information is food. We process it the same way.
You eat lots of diverse ingredients, your body breaks them down and uses what it needs to expand and function and produce energy and action. And what happens when you eat too much food all the time? You get fucking lazy and slow, and don’t do a god damn thing! Pardon my vulgarity. And those mental and physical modes propagates themselves. I’m fat with info and this is my diet. Maybe I’m crazy. This is all quite abstract, but I feel it, and I sense that this is what track I should take for a while. I felt the need to stop reading fiction a few of months ago and really haven’t. Fiction has been captivating me, and has actually been very insightful. I have to remind myself that not all valuable reading is for concrete facts. Moral and philosophical insights, as well as creativity enhancing scenarios are some very beneficial aspects of fiction. Granted it’s best if you read good writers and writings of the higher order.

The Many Fictionalities of Input.
The many fictional worlds that we experience constantly with each song and short story, or relating to a characters story, or another world in a movie, all have a strong influence on the “working reality”of our actual lives. Something as simple as the mood of a song is a fictional realm that envelopes you, and to some extent is in control of how you think and feel. It is the same even with non-fiction, scientific reading, and structured knowledge. All input is something outside of you, comprised of a combination of elements that are foreign and separate from you and your patterns. It is therefore something alien to you, and alters you while you experiencing it, and will surely have a residual affect or influence over your thoughts for some variable amount of time.
These fictionalities vary from medium to medium in their approach, intensities, and overall effect on my own fiction. I say “my own fiction” because that’s all our own personal world is. Our personalities and who we are is an amalgamation of predominantly external sources compiled over time. Our ‘individuality’ is really just a unique set of borrowed characteristics. Who we are is comprised of minuscule amounts of ancestral residue, a large amount of what our parents consciously and subconsciously formed us into, a large part of the group consciousness, or multiple consciousness’ that we fall into at various periods of youth, adolescence, and adulthood, a fair amount of social training and propaganda, and finally we are what we choose to feed ourselves with on the conscious input level. The only unknowable variable on input and influence is perhaps remote influences like ghosts, aliens, possessions, spirits, ancestors, subliminal messages or any sort of channeling from a distinct and unfathomable or untraceable source. I like to think that I keep the propaganda aspect at bay. I would also like to think that I have delved into the ancestral influence more than most. My upbringing was a comfortable one with a fairly continuous evolution of similarities overlapping into the peer influenced era, In which I was fortunate enough to have a great group of experimental and accepting friends. I wasn’t forced into massively detrimental false realities near as much as a lot of youth. The end result of all that is that I’ve had a lot of my time to explore who I actually ‘am’, rather than who I want to make myself into. Which seems to be the modern view on individuality and personality. Nowadays it seems that you create it rather than discover it. It’s just a facade or cladding of the superficial layers of the being. It isn’t so much of who you are, but of what you are. Pulling from external sources rather than internal sources. But what internal sources are there really? I’m constantly searching and redefining that because life is a constantly evolving and revolving cycle that you are best to roll along with as it changes, and revel in all the newness that is available. That’s not to say jump on all the newest trends as they arise, what I’m saying is to be aware of all the new energy around you and make full advantage to stay in tune with everything that pertains to you and where you are headed in life.

Alright, that was a bit of a tangent, but it all still pertains to Input. Onto the influence of the different mediums.

Music is intense. Music truly is a form of magic. It can basically form a persons perception of themself, and they feel like that is who they are. It has the ability to influence or control our perceptions. Rap and Hip Hop is a nice extreme example of that. It tends to make people really believe that’s the world they live in. It makes suburban white kids think they are black kids from the ghetto for fuck’s sake. Superimposed culture. If they weren’t saturated with that music, who would they be? Pop country is just as bad. It’ll make city folk feel like they’re cowboys. There is a fictional world in every genre of music. To be scene is to be herd. We are a creature of image and pretense. For me its the mood of the music that controls me more than the lyrics, message, or surrounding culture. Sad, serious, slow, and somber music (a lot of what I ingest) keeps me on a somber introspective path, with that fueling my perceptions. Rock and Roll, Punk and Metal obviously get me pretty fired up and excited, and I make use of that function regularly. I prefer everything that I do to be intense and rich in whatever form it is. If its fast music, I want it real fast. If its mellow music, I want it deep. If its emotional music I want it as rich and heavy as possible. With all that in mind, music really captivates me deeply and does a great deal in the way of influencing my daily thoughts and moods. I use it as a tool for just that. I’m sure we all do. How strange. I use books and movies in the same fashion. The one continuity of all three is that they alter my perception of who, what, how, and even where I am. Hence the utmost importance of my reasons to currently go without! I am at least mostly aware of the effects of these influences, and actually make use of them like a good amateur wizard should. But then there are the people who watch TV and listen to popular radio music habitually and unconsciously! As if pop culture is the only reality! A steady diet of a very narrow slice of what the world has to offer. That realization frightens me because that is a large part of our modern worldwide culture. When I was much younger I had this idea to go with out listening to music for a year so I could discover my own unspoiled musical voice (I never did), because I realized early that all I was ever doing was just regurgitating my interpretations of the amazing parts of all that I had consciously and subconsciously absorbed. It’s a pretty pathetic and humbling perspective on creativity and individuality that we are mostly composed of external influences. But I do believe it’s quite accurate, and I suppose that I have to be Ok with it. Even the most highly intuitive, genius level creators of amazingly original ideas just have a more unique set of influences. Perhaps also a very different interpretation or mode of regurgitation of those influences. I’ll restate: we are what we eat. Ingest, deconstruct, sort, absorb, reconstruct, excrete. With this analogy art and music (or any creative output) is literally shit! Observe, reflect, think, process, expand, export.
Moving on to movies, they simply transport me to that place for the duration of the flick and sometimes far longer. I often times feel this wrenching reality shift as I walk out of the theatre into the ‘real’ world, or turn off the movie and try to go to bed with that intense ‘other fiction’ flying around in my mind and heart and reality. Movies stimulate the creative and fictional aspects of my mind by expanding it into those new places and scenarios, sometimes only to shrink back painfully into the smallness of the daily mentality.
Books are similar to movies except much less instantly captivating and overwhelming, but much more captivating and overwhelming due to the nature of delivery. Books are perhaps by far the most addicting form of alternate reality I partake of. Music hypnotizes the soul and spirit, books hypnotize the mind. To quote Shannon Hoon “all I can do is read a book to stay awake, and it rips my life away, but it’s a great escape”. You often hear that to have a good vocabulary and to be a good writer you have to read a lot. I guess I agree with that. If you can manage to stay objective while reading a book you can get conscious results or feedback that you can immediately make use of. Otherwise you get completely enveloped in what a writer is feeding you, and it will get directly infused into your subconscious and have to be sorted out later after it filters back up. And that’s where I’m at with reading. I’ve got loads and loads of it shoved into every pore of my being and that’s what I’m trying to see about freeing up, and sorting out by doing this media fast.
I have mostly been referring to reading fiction. Non-fiction, which I read a lot of, is different, but it is input nonetheless and currently equates to clutter. And I will say that all the fiction that I am currently filled with has left no room for knowledge to be deposited, and that kind of pisses me off, because my retention for things is such shit, I have to relearn constantly if I want to “know” anything. I’m guessing between 10-20% instant retention, but it doesn’t stick around too good. It gets ousted or else covered over by newer clutter. I just simply want to have room for more and newer information. My disability to remember due to lacking brain function is another, yet ultimately related matter that I wont get into. When it comes to factual reading, learning and retention, it works best if you can have an immediate use of the information, or some serious pertinence to the info. Your brain knows to put important shit in the right spot! Most of the time. Unless of course it’s totally bombarded with the processes of daily functioning due to a constant overload of processing information, which is the modern mind. It has to process all the information it receives. It is programmed to do so, you just have to give it the proper time, tools, and respect, and it should work just fine. But we generally don’t give it those things. Poor brains, so overused.

Another noteworthy element to these fictional realms we are so fond of is the escapist aspect. For me personally it’s that music and it’s Dionysian and Orphic connection has a very strong link to drugs, drinking, partying, revelry, debauchery, excess, recklessness, letting go, and a myriad other wild, free and explorative pursuits. Good music makes me want to indulge in one of many actions related to the above stated lifestyle. Which just becomes an added layer of fiction to that reality. That is a singular influence that only music has over me. Although, once while watching captain Jack Sparrow do his thing I was wholly moved to drink an entire bottle of rum over the course of the 3 hr movie. And I have also taken mushrooms at a lot of movies over the years for the added effect. Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Avatar, etc. Especially the 3-D movies!

I really think that it would be good for everyone to find out what they have in their lives as constants and just try to go without them for a week, so as to get an ‘away’ perspective of what it is. See how your brain perceives it from a distance. Objectivity is so valuable, yet rarely used in our overly self-absorbed culture. It will most definitely open up new dialogues within yourself.

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