How different the meaning of “precious.” Also “alive.” What the self rearranges.
There was a time.
In the beginning, the excitement of puppies. That generosity. The concept of dependence revised.
A dawning recognition involving hope and helplessness – their power. Sheer organism. Complexity. Alive, mobile, emerging. What wears away, gets broken. What heals, what hardens. Your part in it.
The changing nature of survival, and terms like “health,” “okay,” and “wellness.”
An awareness of trajectories: expansion versus maintenance, collage versus carve, assembling as opposed to mending. The children, the parent.
What persons are. Attachments. Difference. Freedom. Control.
The blowing snow left in their absence. The ways they vanish, into themselves, their people, cracks in the world, airstreams and oceans.
How control rarely changes hands, nearly always remains invisible, what no one grasps.
The erratics of growth, the scale of unexpected development, of motives, of attention.
Intention and the noise inherent in communication. The stage of sighs – their nuances.
We age. Our eyes grow joy and sorrow, and both look like pride coupled to grief.
Randomness of adulthood. Vagaries of time and consequence. Learning curves like tangled thread.
In which case, he writes, for life. As if asked about nothing, in general. There never has to be a reason, what is called illusion or delusion, he can’t remember which. He is at a loss, that much he knows, unsure if “at” is place or time, so often hand in hand.
Writing.
He could just as well be painting, singing, creating some other cultural artifact, and all offered up in an aether, but he’s not. He writes, for life, in this case, as if in general, about nothing. Which is everything also, for him – writing, at a loss – the nowhere now here is.
The words, like images, serve. Serve to draw out and reflect. Like actions or encounters, self-portraits or redundancies. In other words, those would be. In writing he extends his veins and neural works, outstrips his body into text – an alchemy of sorts – and then relates to them as if an other, at a loss, in what he sees, or reads, as the case may be, words as much an image when inscribed.
Which are now here, which were not, because he’s writing. Which, in fact, he does, at a loss – moments so much like chaos, say “entropy” – for the offering of something indicative, external, outside – as if verifying a place and a time, i.e. organizing a disorder, finding a nowhere.
Similar to nothing, in general, become something, in particular. Like an idea, or an atom, an interpreted emotion, or a god. Each action a creation like an assortment of patterns on chaos. Like nothing in general, or everything in particular.
How quiet the morning. How light, though the flashlight remained still on the table. Everything in its place, nothing to ruffle it undone anymore. A morning in which the air had presence, its emptiness. A sea near. He thought to make coffee. Thought to stir things up a bit. Suspected he should act or behave, carry on with routines, open blinds, crack eggs. He could not. Could only stand in this all-too-familiar entrance to morning, and realize. Realize, as empty as the air filled with hazy light, empty as the counters without clutter, that where she had gone she would never return.
They speak of their pleasures, their necessary loves. There are changes you make. Some things are not accidents.
In other words, after decades fueled by a fifth of vodka drenched with grapefruits each day, husband is able to leave it behind. Although he loved it, it was not necessary.
Wife, in her cravings for sugar and salt, discovers with age they are not constitutive, not centrally.
Might be solitude or fine shoes; 80’s music or mountains and seas; active social lives or the thrills of travel, how do you know?
Husband elicits evaluation. Given impending demise, what gives more pleasure?
Wife admits a necessary love.
Husband responds in kind, having been in partial reverie, their warm bed surrounded by shelves of books, so that as he listens he also corresponds. She says. His eyes resting on a spine and the sweet particular music of that voiced tome slithering through him, then the next. Perhaps like chocolate morsels in their process of dissolve upon her tongue.
“I love sentences,” Husband says.
There ensues a pause, a sympathetic “I know.”
He ups to exit, teeth to brush, clothes remove.
He hears “I am a sentence,” a lilting and playful challenge. And wonders just what that might be, each person a length of sentence. The content. He puzzles the verbiage of his own as toothpaste shuffles into his beard.
He returns to the room, it is dark, there is no light to see by.
Opening the covers, he approaches the text, eager to find what it says.
“No bird has the heart to sing in a thicket of questions”
-Rene Char-
“There was something tragic in fighting the borders, the heroism of shortcomings, the panic of passion”
-Bruno Schulz via Jonathan Safran Foer-
It may be raining, very gently, while whispering its verdant perfume, just behind me, just outside my open window. If it’s not, I’m pretending it is, and the world is agreeable.
I’ve been reading an older essay by Susan Sontag entitled “The Aesthetics of Silence,” an article from which I feel a chiding exposure of invented artistic double binds, a renewed challenge for integration and expression (the ways rain shares), and primarily the pleasure of yet another perspective.
Like “the heroism of shortcomings” from Bruno Schulz as carved out of pages by Jonathan Safran Foer in The Tree of Codes – the powers of self-negation and its failure in the likes of Kafka and Kleist, Jabes and Joubert, Artaud and Rimbaud, Blanchot and Beckett and so on. Those great unsilent successes of botched commitments to silence.
As emptiness might only occur in a context of fullness.
Being so glad that I am writing this by hand, as I do with every document I create, usually quite uncertain of what is inside each letter until the systems of nervous muscles begin to work. The quotes above, for instance, copied from handwritten notecards copied from marginal notes and underlines copied from the midst of other authors reworked texts, and then copied again here with the proviso that perhaps in forming it yet another time, by hand, something missed before gains another change to arise.
I am thankful that writing is quiet.
Although I used to use the typewriter’s beat to edit my lines of poetry.
And I’m sure the background music, passing cars, and sounds of squirrels and wind and children all have their effect.
I also appreciate seeing the whole page, battling mood-related or arthritically scribble script versus partial views on-screen and standardized formations of fonts. I enjoy those bloggers who scan their manuscripts and writings but don’t trust your powers of vision compared to the particular words I end up selecting by the time I reach the machine. No need to add difficulty to difficulty, in this case.
Still, you’d probably know something more (or at least differently) were you opening up an envelope gathered from your mailbox with this folded up inside.
Like silence or a thicket of questions, rain or a grumbling stomach, everything comes round to context. Persons embodied, embedded in an active variable surround expressing through media, tools, machines, to wherever, whomever, however you are reading, deciphering, translating, decoding, interpreting, creating yet again in another contextual universe of another time.
Such a dynamic endeavor. Our artifacts, messages, calls and displays.
Panicked passion, tragic fighting of borders, heroic shortcomings these. Aesthetics of silence. All.
All my Words are Silent 