(WITH EYESHOT-PROVIDED EDITORIAL COMMENTARY)
Long-time readers of this site hopefully remember The Rejection of Joshua Bayvers' Deicide. (His last name is not Bayvers, but he'd like it changed to protect against googlers, I guess.) On the last day of August 2003, we received a transmission from him after nearly three years of electronic silence. It looked like this: holy shitballs! i was just looking over my rejection (after a few years), that's a mindfuck and a half. i stopped writing about a year after that, i got really lazy about it really fast. looking back on it now i can't believe how much i wrote, and how shitty some of it was. anyhoo, now i think a few fucked up things and perhaps someday i'll write a fucked up essay and send it to you. you might find it interesting to compare my worldview now to a few years ago. anyhoo, email me back. joshSo we asked if he gave up writing because of the rejection. And we asked him to write a little retrospective something about it all. He replied like this: haha, no you can't take the credit for my not writing. but sometime i'll email you a big rant/essay about stuff. talk to you then.Later on, we received his big rant/essay about stuff. It looked like this: deicide was written in a state of intoxication. a state induced the world's obsession with giving itself meaning. i sought to write a story where everything connected to everything else in some way, and where it was all related to some ultimate meaning. this was, and is, impossible. the story can be rejected, the rejection can be rejected, it can all be rejected forever. the story and the rejection are only the first two sucks on the everlasting gobstopper of endless cynicism.fuck it. i have become so over run by cynicism that i can't bring myself to write anymore. i've gained the ability (or disability) to take any idea into my head and rip it to shit. my mind has become one big shredder. now i am at the edge of everything. my criticism has finally found its way to the very way our world is before us. ideas and concepts. as far as i can tell there is no escaping the world made of ideas and concepts. words. everything has to be made up of words. i can't look at anything without words coming into my mind, or at the very least an abstract concept of that thing i am looking at. everything has to have a label, nothing can just be. there can not be anyhting that just is. unquestioned, unexplained, uncategorized. i've stopped writing because words are so fake. put a bunch of them together and you have a story, or a poem, or a novel, or a book, or just some words. take them individually and each one brings up another set of ideas and concepts which bring up more, and more, and it just continues like this forever without ever really getting at anything, because we're so damned focused on the concept of something that we never really know what it is. you can't even read this without inventing some kind of concept of what this is, or what in the hell i might be thinking. your mind is racing to put me into the category of people who think shit like this. categorized to the point that all meaning is lost. i should not have even written this, because it can never just be, rather it will start you on an endless cycle of thought, one idea linking to the next to the point where what i've said is lost in the void of your mind. step back, and look at this not as an idea or a set of concepts, or as anything, but as nothing, random lines and dots and light infront of you, that's all it really ought to be.
Writing is for Pretentious Assholes The only reason anyone writes, is because they think so highly of their own opinions that they want other people to hear them. Or, it isn't that they think highly of their own opinions, but it is that they just want other people to hear them, and think they're really smart. This is really the reason why most people do or say or write anything. Not because it needs to be done/said/written, but because of this sick desperation to get some attention. Writers all have wet dreams about having blurbs written about them in encyclopedias, or there being discussions about them on public radio at some point in the future. It is likely no one gives a shit about what you have to say, except for those who want to become famous by tearing you apart. Everyone thinks, but not everyone writes, does, or says. "I want to write to be immortalized": get over yourself, you're going to die and only a handful of people will care for only a short period of time. Why then am I writing this? It's simple. I am a pretentious asshole who has wet dreams about having blurbs written about me in encyclopedias, or there being discussions about me on public radio at some point in the future. I dunno if you'll like that or want it on your site, but there it is anyways. If nothing else it looks pretty if you cross your eyes and stare at the screen. HOLY FUCKING DOGS PLAYING POKER! josh
[Forever after at http://eyeshot.net/bayversrevisisted.html]
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