The mind speaks such subtle things when you put your ear close to it.
Poetry or lyric is the starting piece for all writing. It's the furnace, the core. You don't have to see it but it has to be inside. The writing. I think people say, oh that's a real writer, that's a real novel—that's what they're referring to: the awareness that there's this lyrical core, primitive verbal music.
No one notices a writer's mediocrity until they're mainstream, and a different degree of scrutiny is applied. Then it becomes embarrassingly obvious.
There's really no separation between corporations, between media, between government. They seem to me to be one glob-like control apparatus that largely exists to protect and to enrich itself. And it's clear that it will destroy anything or anyone which retains Its independence from the imperatives.1
The scary thing is that the top mirrors the bottom: the soulless bureaucrat pushing levers inside of the FBI or the CIA or the Senate or Congress or State Department— starting wars or arresting political enemies or passing rules to protect or enrich elites—behaves in the same way as the asshole at a party downtown who's trying to protect their clout, their status, their little in-group.
The blob is us and we're the blob; we're both jailer and jailed.
There's a system of control but there's also a culture of control, selfishness, perversity which underwrites it.
This observation is not political in the sense that it's not about party affiliation or ideology because I think I meet non-domineering, controlling sociopaths of all stripes more and more frequently, whose automaticity, animal cruelty, violence, laziness, (usually masked by sanctimoniousness) feels endemic, locked in.2
It does not want you to think. It does not want you to pursue excellence or goodness. It really wants you to cower in fear. And to believe that the solutions it provides for that fear are in fact the only positive good in the world.
There's no focal point here. There's no central conspiracy. There's no bad guy. There's just this human selfishness and will to self-preservation. This inherent lawlessness and violence within human nature gets aggregated and formalized in systems of control, some of which we call government, some of which we call corporations, militaries, NGOs, clubs, parties etc.