Tags
action, Jains, life, Negative Geography, pain, suffering, thought, two-edged sword
Sharing along a post from Negative Geography with gratitude for the illumination.
02 Monday Feb 2026
Posted in A Work of Love, americana, light, nature
02 Monday Feb 2026
Posted in A Work of Love, americana, light, nature
Tags
action, Jains, life, Negative Geography, pain, suffering, thought, two-edged sword
tom clausen 
Thanks Tom, that’s kind of you.This Negative Geography obsession is kind of odd in some ways. They have an inconsistency of voice from essay to essay that makes them hard to follow for most. Also, the subject itself is so peculiar that a typical “personal voice” is something I have to avoid for the most part. I mean, a personal narrative is what most people want to read in an essay. These are more like philosophical Vaudeville performances, where the voice is the thing being dissected. Because you mentioned liking some of the more personal reflections I included in this and other recent things, which I usually don’t indulge in. They’re sprinkled throughout all of their rare. Because like I said in one of the essays: “I can’t remain too long in any consistent first person, otherwise you’ll end up believing that I’m really me, and then I’ll be pinned inanimately to the page and unable to shape-shift as any living creature must if it hopes to avoid the tarpits.So, I treat the voice (this self) like the detritus of memory, a junk-encrusted tumbleweed of ideas of myself, a messy and clanging assemblage of cans and can’t-do’s, recoils, crossed-wires and lost marbles. And this would explain why I’m such a noisy sonofabitch.
It’s a disentanglement (or negation) of the biting dogmas of a pre-Gallilean Self, who still thinks it is the real center of the universe.
More succinctly, here’s my theory of voice: If we make this conscious distinction between thought and being, then we are able to move in and out of the shapes imposed on perception by thought and language. This allows us to remain somewhat aloof from who we think we are.
Thanks again, I’m done
Great thanks Jeff, I understand and appreciate and will admit I do read your essays but get ‘lost’ in most of them and maybe that is the point! Perhaps my getting lost is exactly what you are guiding the reader to recognize that their personal tethers are unreal and unraveling and are not who we are. I guess I like knowing who I am and not feeling lost even though I know that is a fool talking but then I have known all along that my identity and self are quite fleeting, malleable, unreliable, fictitious and unmemorable even if I might try to attach myself to certain quirks and quarks of being. I made the comment I did in part because I rarely feel capable of making a verbal response to your lengthy philosophical essays and this one with the chickens crowded in their small cage really felt tangible and accessible to me whereas others often become dramatic mental gymnastics of a sort where I don’t know what , if anything, I could say. By the way, if you are not Jeff, do you want me to address you by another name or are you no name the original face before you were born?
You can call me Zingryo for now.Tom, the ironic thing is that I ended up hating this particular essay, because it was melodramatic, mainly. So, I changed it and invited my cat to give me these words of wisdom instead of me acting like I understand already, which I don’t. It’s a contemplation and prayer of sorts, I guess. For the human being, for me included, to remember what we all knew at birth, along with every other creature. But lost in the course of training.As far as the essays in general. I do think you’re tuned to a frequency that makes my frequency seem impossible to hear clearly. It’s like trying to listen to a talk show while listening to a rap song (and I’m not allegorically defining either of us in that analogy). I’m just saying, two frequencies that pass in the night sometimes. Although I think your frequency is beautiful. But I can hear yours from here, but you can’t hear mine. And that’s ok, I make it as clear as I can and to me I’m making sense and opening a vista — or, a vista is opening and this comes with it.But it’s so kind of you to constantly dip into this stuff in case something makes sense. Thanks
Did I ever say how much I enjoyed this? Thank you!
Grateful thanks, Susan, glad you enjoyed this post. Jeff is a long time friend from the early days of us both working at Mann Library after we graduated.