nightmares, Everest and how i should spend my time

i've had nightmares for three nights running: being unprepared for class, discovering a coworker's mutilated corpse, and my family being attacked by lions in the North Carolina mountains. sadly, these unpleasantries were neither interesting nor complex, but rather the generic garden variety nightmares that any Austrian this side of Freud could interpret and diagnose.

but this is beside the point.

the point is that i've found myself caught mid-stutter these past days or, more precisely, sutured within a stutter. i think it has something to do with over-reading. i've been consuming tens of thousands of words each day, working my way deeper into research for my thesis. at this point i know i have enough to write, but i keep finding myself being drawn to one more thing and one more thing

and one more thing:

i've been here before.

i read last night about reincarnation in the Mahayana tradition. their conception of cosmological history is truly impressive, divided into kulpas, which are massive time frames that may (or may not) equal the time elapsed between one big bang and the next. according to the book, a traditional description of a kulpa is that it is "the time it would take for a bird with a piece of silk in its talon, flying once every century over the top of Mount Everest so that the silk brushes its peak, to completely erode the mountain."

the north face of Chomolungma

that's a long time.

i have some thoughts on the matter that have nothing to do with the matter at hand, but i do wonder about Everest. allegedly, it is known to those who know it best as Chomolungma – the Goddess Mother of the World – and this fact alone reminds me of what Chris Marker calls "the unbearable vanity of the West."

apparently George Everest argued against having the peak named in his honor, but i have difficulty attributing such humility to one of the great colonial geographers of our time. (the Greeks, i believe, would call it a problem of ethos.) regardless, it is doubtful that Everest ever even saw the Goddess that now bears his name. if my yin were here, she would say "that's exactly what you need to spend your time thinking about."

Sir George Everest, the world's most famous dead geographer

i suppose it doesn't matter.

what does matter is that all this reading has left less time for writing, and i've found myself recycling old material on this site, quoting other people, and generally avoiding the keyboard. Saylor tells me that there are "input periods" and "output periods" in the creative process, and i suppose the summer was one of those input periods for me. the seasons have shifted, however, and i feel now that the time is right to write...

so to speak.