Closing chapter
Thank you for reading along! It’s time to try to wrap this up with some questions I am asking myself regarding Eisenhower on Drums.
It’s written like an interview, carried out by my superego.
HEAD FAKE?
If this whole thing turned out to be a cover up for something else, what would that be?
I am sometimes able to trick myself into thinking that I’m working on something, later realising that it served a different purpose altogether. Sometimes this new awareness is a gift from my past self, if the work turns out to be more profound than I thought, and at other times I have to face a dead end.
If all aspects of this paper are taken into account, it seems like I have been trying to make my big Voice the Unknown project after all, trying to “unify all aspects”. I’ve been making the respective tools when I needed them - in my life as much as in the creative work - and only when I had built the right framework could I design the EoD project and get to do creative work in Q2.
Of course, the building of the framework is creative work too, and very often I have been in the Open Mode working on it.
CONTROL AS A PREREQUISITE FOR FREEDOM?
What is the word for making all these matrixes and posters and specific modes of action?
I guess the word is control.
Making the frameworks, working methods, daily routines, etc. serves the purpose of getting to work, in the hope of reaching a creative state of mind. Reading the book Daily Habits, I understood that this order of actions is rather common in the lives of a long list of artists and thinkers.
Okay.. obviously you find the work and it’s implications interesting and helpful, but, I’m having doubts about whether describing this big framework for possible Open Mode entry will be helpful for anyone else than people with attention deficit disorder.
That’s an important point, and I’m really not sure if it will. But honestly, it doesn’t keep me up at night, not at the moment. Although I really wish to make something useful for others, I have designed the project to help myself out of the ditch, and relating it outwards would just be a bonus.
OUBOROS
“Won't we always be trapped in our own ways of doing things?
This is one way to say it, and as a born pessimist, I’ll often be inclined to say it like this. But as much as the cell door is closing, and we are sentenced to be laughed at by the younger, brighter and more open minded, there is a great journey ahead, just as great as the one behind us. Without a doubt.
And I do believe in reviving the soul, insisting on living, opening our eyes and trying to see what feels old as the constantly reborn phenomena it is in the realest reality!
Talking about choosing your perspective on the matter of being a creative giant and a petty human all at the same time, I am reminded of what Django Bates said once in a piano lesson about Keith Jarrett: “My hero is an asshole!”
And then I remind myself of two things: The real weight of that sentence is on the word hero, and Django Bates probably doesn’t know Keith Jarrett personally.
In any case, life is complex and contradictory, we will open and close and open and close and even the Buddha may have had a bad day sometimes.
A note about writing this paper (while writing it)
I did everything I could to stay in an open mode when the deadline approached for this paper.
Going to sweden to write, I made sure to do a EoD session every day.
Now may 9th, with one week till hand in, and only half of the paper written, I’m starting to feel some pressure, and it gets harder to keep the spirit of the project alive in the writing.
What I’m doing right now is to use a 10 minute hourglass and switching between the different chapters to make sure I don’t get stuck, and to keep the writing fluent in the noting style. When I have a mass of direct, unpretentious thought written down, I will revise everything and make it coherent and decent to read, while hopefully not strangling the text in the process of doing so.
Now, it’s may 19th, meaning that the deadline for my messy pdf was three days ago, and there’s still a lot more to write. There’s two ways to go here; I could give myself a hard time for not having thought everything through before the deadline, and for underestimating how much time it would take to create this sizeable homepage. Or, I can just be happy and content that I’m making something that I can keep on using in the future.
I think I'll go with that.
