Organizing Principle

She decided she did not want to write her dissertation, that, really, she had never wanted to. She had been keeping it alive, as many people with ADD do, as an organizing principle in her life, something that although it regularly and predictably emanated pain and anxiety, still provided an axis around which she could organize.
  -- Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder from Childhood to Adulthood, Simon & Schuster, 1994

When I read this, the first thing I thought of was my big unwritten novel. It's a hell of a good book, just the thing I'd want to read, so long as its existence didn't remind me how I've failed to write my own book. But the original idea germinated around 1990 and though its grown since then in scope and detail, it hasn't actually been written. I've spent a lot of creative energy instead on various forms of "social" online writing, real life exigencies, and, of late, activities related to Burning Man. This has occasionally caused me to wonder if I really cared about writing it -- and now, this idea that I've really just used it as a mental organizing tool highlights that question.

I love to read the fine details of history and immerse myself in the endless tiny tales untold therein. But the thought of mustering all those impressions and all that knowledge into a comprehensible narrative sounds like way too much work. I'm not against work. When I find something I can focus on, I work very hard. But the nature of the work I can really focus on is a little mysterious, a little hard to identify; and it's evident that, so long as the rest of life is distracting me, writing is not in that category.

Sonja read to me another passage in that book, which I can't find now for a direct quote, but which in effect generalized the above to say that some people with ADD continually look for things to worry about, absolutely including things they do not need to worry about, as an organizing principle, so as to provide the order to life that they need and that their minds otherwise cannot provide. She read that to me because it was a behavior she observed in me. I could readily see how.

(nota bene: I've decided just now that I am finished with the old conceit of blogging "anonymously". What possible good does it do? Perhaps if the modern froth known as social networking (especially Facebook) has done anything positive, it is in blurring the lines of internet privacy so much that we are forced to learn privacy really is an abstraction without any real meaning in human society. I hope I don't sound like some horrific liberal saying that, but think about it. Before the advent of technology -- e.g. private banking records -- what privacy was there? There's a terse little discussion here. I'm not arguing for anything invasive. Just saying that changing names and hiding everything to the extent that we have been doing in blogs etc. now seems a little silly. Hi. My name is Don. If you don't want me to accidentally use your real name here, tell me -- when I do it, not now.)

Am I saying I should quit aspiring to write novels and instead bury myself in, say, the large-scale multimedia installations that are really exciting to think about, e.g. programmed algorithmic LED arrays affixed to large uneven surfaces that respond in unexpected ways to music and camera-captured motion? Y-y-y, no, yes, no I'm not. I'm saying it's useful, I dare say necessary, to continue to peel the onion and find out what I really, I mean really, no really really, want to do, just me, and for me, and for no one else. I kicked that process forward when I left my wife, and lurched this way and that with it as other relationships started and grew and shifted into something other than forward growth (hard to describe, since relationships never really end); but I don't know how well I'm doing, since these changes aren't always happy ones, and I'm not always really certain that I am acting for myself and not for some aspect of the internal programming implanted by others (a simple example of that is the idea that marriage is life-long but obviously I refer to subtler forms). I've been peeling that onion with regard to relationships, but now I am looking at it with regard to my creative life (which is, in a perfect world, pretty much my entire life); and the fact that I've been almost eighteen years at a company I've had doubts about working for since day one is clearly also going to come under the onion-peeling lamp at some point. Nothing, in a life honestly led, is safe from investigation.

The quantity of this verbiage also suggests that the mysterious desire to blather away in a blog forms a sort of organizing principle too. Why do I really do it? Why do you?

Taken at Burnal Equinox, Nevada City, March 2, 2013