Losing

Ash grey little body only upright heart beating face to endlessness.  Old love new love as in the blessed days unhappiness will reign again.  Earth sand same grey as the air sky ruins body fine ash grey sand.  Light refuge sheer white blank planes all gone from mind.  Flatness endless little body only upright same grey all sides earth sky body ruins.  Face to white calm touch close eye calm long last all gone from mind.  One step more one alone all alone in the sand no hold he will make it.

– Samuel Beckett, Lessness

Distractedly riffling through old notebooks stacked, shelved and scattered about my working space, some dating to 1991. 

For most of my life I’ve desired to be a writer.

Nearly all of my life I’ve been writing.

Reading.  Writing.  Reading.  Writing.  Reading.  Writing.  Thinking.

Once out of the home, off on my own, out in the world,

the marginalia and doodles, notes in the headers and footers,

grew redundant with desire…

…desire for language to do some certain things,

…desire to be a certain sort of sayer, singer:

to write the ambiguities.

Repeatedly:  to be a writer of “the grey,” “the foggy,” the layered and the liminal.  Experience thickly translucent, ambivalent, inconclusive and unclear.  That light in which even our shadows go unseen.

Yet over time, enduring work, assembling children, compiling experience, occasioning love and its passing by,

encountering mortality in its consistent accumulation of extraction,

my writing desire grows more active,

toward the active,

and its happening,

writing verbally,

writing living:

to write losing.

Losing in its agility and operation, its perpetuity. 

Losing as it eventuates and proceeds, universally, in each instant.

TO WRITE LIVING : LOSING

to loose losing

…perhaps to lose it…

…face to endlessness…

will he make it?

Erosion, take two

II.

This is the story of how I began telling the truth.  The truth I defined as “two truths and at least one lie.”  The truth of my experience.

Poets often carry sorrow in their sockets – some underlying angst influencing attention.  There’s sclera, iris, pupil, and a deepening mirror of perceived pain…or seared “ego.”  Grief or grudge – and difficult to distinguish.

As much as there is to learn or to know, some simple patterns give the slip.  Once you figure a composing context, the information is derived.  Look out for what might constitute survival for each respective entity.  Aim your inquiry there.

Parents hurt as much as heal.  As do love and risk and wisdom (or well-being).  All that is given in life is also taken away – exactly when it is given.

Everyone canvasses sorrow.  The surgeons in their trembling hands, the librarians in their order.  The therapist’s reflective stance, architect’s angles, businessman’s mettle.  We all know that we’re going to die.  Celebrities in their acclaim, the athletes in their strength, and whores in their affection.  Everything is risk.

truthlies

Corrosion: Friday Fictioneers August 3

Home from vacating for a couple days.  Free-write 100 words prompted by photo as follows (thanks to Friday Fictioneers / Madison Woods instigations/inspirations.  Please join)

The trouble is corrosive.  Is rank.  I do not say what you think I say.  I do not say what you say I say.  I hear you wrong.  Rot.  You love taking pictures of ruins.  I love the effects of rust.  On iron.  On rock.  The meal of erosion is slow.  Don’t yell.  Things erase when we turn our heads.  Eyes such enormous editors.  My ears confuse wind with anger.  What you think is running water is something else.  Is sobbing.  Are tears.  Words are constructed of contexts.  Are hints and withers.  What accrues is corrosive.  Is gentle.  Is fierce.

N Filbert 2012