As we press the pedals into 2012, a couple of things really lodge in my sternum: the surprise that this venture into the blogging world (though only a month along) has been for me – a very humbling gratitude to anyone and everyone who takes the time to peruse my thoughts and inspirations – and the fascinating forum it becomes as one is able to see one’s own work influencing and influenced by what so many others are doing! Yay for humans! Please, everyone – keep at what drives your hearts and minds – and thank you for doing so. Secondly, these natural contextual rituals like a calendar and a “New Year,” arbitrary as they may be, stimulate some wonderful and interesting contemplations of turnings. Year after year at the turning of years, I revisit Helene Cixous’ Firstdays of the Year, and each year it grows in its timeliness and profundity in a camaraderie of projects, of languaging, of approaching life. A quotation I have underlined in red at every reading, this year expanded to a whole page of certain significance for me, and I’d like to share it for you others out there scribbling away from your blood onto surfaces of light or papers:

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from Firstdays of the Year by Helene Cixous:

“She began like this: “The book I want to write, the one I dread writing, is the one that would begin like this: I’m going to tell you at last, and for the first time, everything I now know about the most hidden truth.”

“With these words, with the word hidden followed by the word truth, doubt spread out inside her, and just as quickly hopelessness began. She feared. With the one fear, she feared discovering, at the end of a long, cruel excavation, that there was no “hidden truth,” that there never had been.

“She (truth) was not at the beginning, there was no secret. There were only mistakes and corrections. She feared having to, in the end, lose all hope and all illusion. And those who had always affirmed truth’s impossibility would laugh at her.

“And at the same time she feared, with the other fear, discovering the truth. And seeing in the end with her own eyes her own face unmasked, to her eternal regret. Yet, she told herself, isn’t every discovery true? And everything we say is truth. And we only lie in the hope of creating a more tolerable reality. And lying is often preferable, lying can be a kindness.

“Still, Truth had always been her dream. But reaching the truth? It seems so far away. The sun hidden behind the sun…

“She had writing, she had the desire. She hadn’t the possibility.”

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Repeatedly, in reading this passage, I have scribbled along the edges: “yes! with every writing” or “yes! every book!” And indeed, with each thing I attempt to language, my instigation is always that “I’m going to tell you at last, and for the first time, everything I now know about the most hidden truth(s).” And I am wanting to again. Whether examining a photograph, recounting an experience, experimenting with languaging itself, or attempting the creation of a story or character…I am wanting to tell the most hidden things, the ones I don’t know how to say, that seem impossible to say, that seem like they must be said. And I appreciate all the rest of you who also are making the effort at depicting the “sun behind the sun,” somehow, I believe, it moves us all along. Here’s to the efforts!