“Language is like drinking from one’s own reflection in still water.

We only take from it what we are at that time.”

Simon van Booy

I am in that wonderful uncertain state that obtains from living in fiction.  Where everything seems possible, if only remotely, vague, unsettled, inchoate but perhaps.

Almost readiness, but not that far along – the will hasn’t settled on a course.  No vision.

Like mentality, meshed, hovering over blank canvas or pages, just floating, sliding, swirling there, as smoke in greasy air, almost substantial, but easily wavered away.

The open.  Projects jumbled in mind and heart but no spark, no instigation, a veil of nettles slightly stinging but not enough yet for action.

Voices, emotions, some words even, indistinct but actual, rumble about in cranium and neck, but none find their ink.

In Athens, in Russia, in Oregon.  Younger, older, right now.  Finland, Norway.  Remote but still civilized.

I can’t tell whose stories are whose – other authors, your own characters, events, relatives, unknowns – dictionaries and thesauri swimming about,

yes, like that, the lessened gravity of submersion – eyes closed but able to perceive light, feel objects and presences, a wafting

and ever the questions – what now?  who now?  when?

“It is in the unconscious that fantasy, moments of the day, and memory live, a reservoir for the poetry of the world.  Is everything else prose?  Is what’s conscious ordinary prose, the prose of the world?”

“Or, I tease, the pose of the world.  She is separating much too neatly the world she knows – I nearly wrote word for world – from the world she doesn’t know, the one that owns her and to which she is a slave.  She is a slave to what she can’t remember and doesn’t know and she is a slave to what she remembers and what she thinks she knows.  Her education has damaged her in ways she does not even know.”

Lynne Tillman

“But I have always spoken, no doubt always shall, of things that never existed, or that existed if you insist, no doubt always will, but not with the existence I ascribe to them”

“So I shall merely state, without enquiring how it came, or how it went, that in my opinion it was not an illusion, as long as it lasted, that presence of what did not exist, that presence without, that presence within, that presence between, though I’ll be buggered if I can understand how it could have been anything else”

Samuel Beckett