Living is a Kind of Madness
Writing is a madness.
When you hope the tearing will be done.
The ripping sound, then gathering the pieces, hoping to see something in the jumbled pile. Of sorts.
Wife calls this “attachment theory” by which I assume she means something along the lines of conflict and loss=feeling or that consequence, because
What making is
or seems to be
dealing with all that
There are four rocks on my desk, well really one is a petrified bone from the penis of a whale and then the rest seem partially fabricated, only insofar as some human’s hand has touched them, obviously, thereby construing them an “object” (too smooth, too bastardized to be native, believable) [“object” for attachment or detachment I presume]
See, they’re kind of “favorite things,” talismans after a fashion, that’s why they occur more than once. They make up my surround, thereby influencing my thought and otherwise.
like wife, reclining Buddha, a mouse holding sheaths of quotations up for my view and mystical hands (an encaustic painting/collage by said wife) among other things (or everything else in my surround). I’d share more pictures but why should you care, and I’m not interested in that kind of common knowledge.
Suffice it to say loads of books shape my nest. Maybe I can’t bear being alone or something. Noisy conversations –
– imagine that!? – a cacophony of chattering, ceaseless, every voice saying something earth shatteringly important (leastwise how they say it). That’s the chaos I exist in.
for examples.
Perhaps the “madness” referred to above comes blitzing out of the concatenation of conversing brilliant voices from remarkable minds, a kind of primordial dust for my own flint-ticking brain to spark fires.
(Be that as it may)
I have children too, seven to be exact, all offering a raw freshness of human expression and avarice at all times, a kind of explosive vitality of persons-in-the-making for good or for ill (for themselves). A mighty influx and demand for my own crusty mechanisms to mulch and digest
tearing gathering stepping back to observe
if any forms…
“Explosive” on purpose because so agile and all-over at once (waking-through-sleeping), those children: angry, eager, generous and quick-witted; intelligent, selfish, selfless; hard, tender, but all of it, more total-like, not sundered quite the same as middle age.
Creates shards, fragments, flames and flights; more noise; more wonder and awe and helplessness. More hope. Some despair.
I’d call it “love,” not certain what attachment theory would say (I probably appear shell-shocked or “detached” much of the time in my overwhelm).
This is how I row the boat.
Wrap scraps and strings around a heap
(it doesn’t hold much, but some things stay intact, at least temporarily, in this way)
I call it “writing”
I feel a little less like I lose it if I make a note of it. Or even list it…a touch more manageable, as if one element at a time – even though that’s farcically fictitious.
The part that’s “real” or “true” being that my hands are only capable one word at a time, one mark really, even if contiguous; that is, at best, letter-by-letter…
Tearing Gluing
stringing lines
Attempting to bundle a cloud of dust, as it were
(it doesn’t have to be children – alive and loud silent genius-voices buzz about the ether as well)
(it could be anything – smells (or stench) of a passenger next to you, the size of the landscape, wind, employment, hardship, illness, memory, emotions)
you name it (which can help)
it’s too big or way outsizes you
To be alive is to exist in maximum-capacity space every moment
(i think)
(writing is one way to pretend it’s not quite, like snagging only one butterfly in the net when there are thousands, or at least saying so, which does something, the admission of helplessness, an individual’s version of a “demand letter”)
Now I’m thinking attachment theory might resemble a semiotician’s “systems theory,”
i.e. whoever says ‘system’ says arrangement or conformity of parts in a structure which transcends and explains its elements…everything is so necessary in it that modifications of the whole and of details reciprocally condition one another, Emile Benveniste shouts out above the crowd from the shelf over yonder
Makes a kind of common sense
Like signifier and signified aren’t terrifically helpful concepts examined separately, since neither one exists without the other, really one concept catching light as it flutters…anyhow, language (perception-interpretation) does that
stairs going up and down
both sides of the paper
chickens and eggs
ad nauseum
ripping apart (abstraction)
melding together (composition)
as it were.
Perhaps its a process, if you stretch it out a little, set it in motion (notice it always already is)
and so on…
embedded on my body
“i am here, more than that i do not know, further than that i cannot go”
-Franz Kafka-
“i am what is around me”
-Wallace Stevens-
N Filbert 2011
