Sometimes I feel like I deserve an explanation from myself. I need to tell myself exactly what I did and why and to what end? If anybody at all is listening to me, they need to know exactly what I mean by it…? And if don’t altogether know exactly what I mean by it, why would I feel the need to do or say it? isn’t that the essence of communication? If nobody knows exactly what’s going on, how are they supposed to respond to it? Could I explain why anybody at all should be listening to me? Wouldn’t I just be dragging somebody else into my confusion, or at best my ambivalence? Is anybody looking to have their uncertainty confirmed? What exactly is your position on ambivalence? If you don’t know that, you will never be offered a job!
You need to know who your target audience is. What category you belong to. Who in particular you are trying to appeal to. People who don’t know exactly what’s going on in their life? Or what they need to do or think to make their lives better? If you’re not doing that, you’re just making people feel worse or even more uncertain that they already are. Not good for any marketing campaign. I heard Garrison Keillor once state quite emphatically that if you’re not being paid to write, why would anybody write at all? Of course, at the time I considered this the most ludicrously insulting statement I’d ever heard. May as well tell someone there’s no point thinking anything unless it has commercial value. No point doing any art at all unless it profits you financially. otherwise it is “just” a “hobby’> Tell that to Van Gogh. Though he obviously knew it would make millions for somebody at some point, most likely after he was dead. The man must have really been a genius to know that. A lopped-off ear and a suicide clinched the deal. That guy really knew what he was doing and why…To live on in his starry starry nights forever! Perhaps I need a little more self-mutilation and despair in my life? Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder?
Of course it’s more appropriate and undoubtedly more consoling for such as myself to consider he simply had no choice to do what he did, whether he liked it or not, whether he loved it or not… And if anybody doesn’t consider “love” a perpetually fluctuating condition of ambivalence, either grasping at identifiable straws or determinedly defining definitions of the undefinable, I’d say they might have a financially viable future in the Hallmark business. No less so in some other immediately identifiable business that posits hate as a fixed proposition. People love to know who or what they certainly hate. And they’d hate to be told they don’t love somebody in particular. Particulars are key to making this world go round. Generalities are less marketable unless they can readily be adapted to the particular.
ref. “THE STEVE BELLWOOD SHOW AND TELL” podcast on podomatic. Everything you need to know about what I’m not exactly sure of. Plus ongoing audio / also on Rumble / plus fiction narrative and 8 episodes aborted radio series on podbean…