Waking Ideas

In continuing with what started last week, today’s Ride the Fire Eagle Danger Day recommended site is Annabelle, Believe!.   Annabelle, Believe! is an semi-anonymous blog written by Bobby. I started reading the site two weeks ago and it has been a consistent, good read. The site contains a very personal perspective into the author’s mind and life, which perspective I am able to relate to.

Recently, Bobby wrote about Diamond Heists as a metaphor for an album, as well as the bewildering move from music being albums to now labels now pushing for singles again.

Think all those heist movies, with dark shadings and double crosses and plot twists, but in music form. I was using the ideas as metaphors for finding out who somebody is, and finding out who you can trust. [...] But as more and more songwriters and recording artists move away from albums as cohesive, interconnected pieces of art, and more toward albums as mere collections of songs, I resist that movement kicking and screaming, at every single turn. I will wage war on it. I can’t even write a single song that doesn’t have a family of sister songs whose jobs are to explore similar ideas while simultaneously being able to stand on their own.

As I have read through the entire archives since discovering the site, I thought it would be more appropriate to interview the author of the site.  Gratefully, he agreed. Below is the interview that followed:

Waking Ideas: Your site Annabelle, Believe! , is at one level, very personal, a perspective into your mind and life, and at the same time, you address what I call the “unresolved questions and difficulties of the collective”, not in an definitive question-answer format, but a narrative, slice of life journaling where each post continues to reveals additional lessons learned from your experiences or thoughts, that apply to the whole human collective.

Is intentional, or perhaps an beneficial unintended consequence?

Annabelle, Believe: I guess I’m going to have to say it’s an unintended consequence, because until recently, I had never, ever thought about it that way. But if it winds up reading that way, that makes me insanely happy to hear.

See, people started following me on Tumblr, and since it was a relatively small number of pages, they could read through the entire site in an hour or so. So after realizing that, I skimmed back through everything I had written and I perceived a lot of “randomness”. So I wondered if I should write some kind of primer or explanation for why I was writing in the first place.

But then I realized I do the same thing to other people whose weblogs I read — I just dive in and read as much of them as possible, sometimes all the way back to the beginning. And I wind up having a pretty firm grasp on what they’re about. So I decided to leave mine be: no Mission Statements.

And I think even though these weblogs are in chronological order, unless people shape what they put into them that way — like a weight-loss journal or something? — nobody’s “random” journal thoughts are ordered like a beginning-to-end story or narrative. But if you just read through it all, and read their random thoughts, it’s almost like pointillism — all those different drops of ink are seemingly random, but who they are as a person is right there on display once you step back from it and view it as a whole.

And I enjoy that, because your own mind and perception of the person fills them all in for you. And that may also be where the “universals” that apply to all people come from — how we all wind up relating. We do a lot of the filling in.

WI: Do you think personal journals and other collections of thoughts (regardless of the medium) have the same application (depending on the reader/viewer, different perspectives would be seen) ?

AB: I think that’s why we do this. Why we read other people’s journals and why we write our own.

You figure, at one end of the spectrum, you have those people out there who believe the “theory” behind the site Twitter to be how it is actually practiced, and that every single Twitter feed just reads:

waking up
eating breakfast
in the car to work
at work

And of course those people would be correct in scoffing at such a site.

And opposite that, at the other extreme end of the spectrum, you would have a completely detailed record or almanac of everything in a certain person’s existence for a certain period of time. Obviously that’s impossible and daunting, and very few people could ever read that.

So the middle of that spectrum is what we’ve got going. Pick what spot you fall on in both what you want to write, and in what you want to read.

But whether it’s the person’s thoughts, or art, or detailed stories about things they did that day, it’s still them doing the thinking, creating, and the writing. So you can’t help but gain perspective on bigger picture things when you see all other people’s viewpoints.

People fascinate the hell out of me.

WI: What do you think are your main motivations for writing?

AB: I write a lot of poetry and songs, and some short stories, for those obvious reasons. And they sometimes get posted.

But in terms of keeping a Tumblog (Tumblrog?), it’s actually kinda selfish now that I think about it. The damn site could be 100% private. So I’m almost forcing myself to keep track of my thoughts and philosophies. By allowing other people to read them, I’m signing on the dotted line, and almost notarizing it all. But it’s 90% for me — It’s not to prove it all to the people who actually read it, it’s to prove it all to myself.

It’s almost like I’m writing it all down to discover just who the fuck it is I am, maybe?

Does any of that make sense?

WI:Do you prefer writing using a computer or by hand (pen/pencil/paper) ?

AB: Song lyrics get written down by hand, but I think everybody who has used a computer for a while finds that their thoughts flow extremely swiftly into it and through it.

WI: Often times, I consider my mind more connected to my fingers in terms of what I want to say. That is I feel I am able to articulate as close to the idea that I am attempting to communicate, better through written word rather than spoken word. In a non-scientific poll, I’ve found a number of people who describe that same ability of articulation through writing. Extrapolating that possible group of people (however small or large) to a global society, how do you think this affects the spread of ideas, different points of view, and critical scientific research?

AB: This is something I’ve thought several metric-tons about thanks to the advent of the internet.

I think it’s definitely true, but it’s true in two ways — people *can* freely express / communicate better through instantaneous typed word, and people are *more willing* to express and communicate that way.

I’m sure it’s been studied somewhere in depth, but I still don’t think people really grasp the immense implications. We’re at an absolutely unprecedented time in civilization. It trumps the printing press, hands down. Yeah, we’ll get past what purists worry about — language will never be reduced to people speaking like the stereotypical teenage girl: (o rly, u r 2), although we may see a slight dip in people’s communication skills. All those goddamn cat photoshops…

But I’m guessing you already see the implications? Can you imagine everybody in the world with a laptop, willing and able to communicate and share ideas? There’re already thousands of new artists gaining exposure almost daily, imagine all the savants and Ramanujans that may be out there?

The society in the United States, and in general, the ‘Western’ world (possibly the rest of the world too) has continually struggled with addressing minority points of view: personalities, politics, psychiatry, religions, and many other points of view in which the large majority have preconceived notions of ‘what is and what should never be’ and yet, very few have all the information available.

WI: Do you think there is a ’shadow inventory’ of people who are writing online, or in their own paper journals, attempting to work out these unresolved differences in points of view, privately in fear of disturbing the status quo or being ostracized for having a point of view contrary to the ‘majority’?

AB: Hmmmm… I’d like that to be the case, but even that point of view is very “Western” when you think about it. When you go back to the notion that we’re more expressive thanks to the internet and the information age, at some point we might be able to throw out the top-down, majority-minority viewpoint altogether? All those points of view almost make for a harmonious viewpoint?

It’s like, regardless of what we speculate about, what is actually happening, because of all this social revolution and large spread of ideas that we’re talking about? What is actually happening is very “Eastern”.

That’s to say, in a big picture sort of way, if you actually add up all those points of view, all that information, all those ideas, they’re becoming one big organism. An organism of ideas themselves. And it’s extremely democratic, and it’s shifting, and evolving, and taking on a life of its own. So life is less Western, reductionist, with a few people holding the information, the ideas, the absolutes. It’s more Eastern, holistic, where the “absolute” is the result of everybody’s contributions.

Obviously, a living, breathing, evolving organism of ideas like that is going to tidy up itself, pushing certain things to the front burner (freaking Susan Boyle), putting certain things on the back burner. Maybe at that point, the less sightly ideas, the top-down “orders” or thoughts that are almost fascist in nature — maybe they’ll become vestigial in the idea organism.

Maybe I’m thinking way too deeply.

But at least you can read that answer and verify that yes, thoughts flow easily through typing.

WI: You write quite a bit about our (human’s) perception of different things, from epiphanies to time to how we feel about songs. You have hinted at your current opinion regarding knowledge and how our brains work.

Do you think that a version of platonic realism and recollection is close to reality?

AB: Absolutely, it’s more or less one of my main philosophies on life. We all have different capacities as human beings. Because math is universal, that’s the example I always use. My 7 year old nephew can do addition & subtraction. I can struggle and do Calculus. Daniel Tammet, the savant from London, can “see” mathematical results in his mind, as colorful landscapes, and perform immense computations because of it.

It’s one thing to have a “thought” but to have a “thought” verified by the outside world? Something in my gut tells me it’ll keep going, and there’ll be another outside world out there, too.

Art may also be a universal language. And if you want to go down that road, then music, and language itself, and beauty itself — all that may be “universal”.

When I think about this, I get way too far-out, and I tend to believe people as having “access” to another “realm” where all that universal “is”, while their physical bodies are a part of this world. Their minds as the conduit. A physicist named Max Tegmark has a similar theory, with math at the top:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_ensemble

Obviously once you start thinking this deeply, it snowballs. And you do it more and more. And after zooming out far enough, you wind up thinking like Plato.

But it blows me away because I didn’t find Tegmark’s theory and THEN start thinking these things. I started thinking similar thoughts and THEN found that he’d already came to them.

More evidence of both universals — and the fact that I’m slightly off my rocker.

WI: What are some other possibilities (if there are) that you consider?

AB: Solipsism, every time I have to snap back into reality after getting lost in my thoughts for a short time

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