Last week I in fact took one day “off.”  Truly OFF.  It rained.  I read.  It rained.  I read.  I wrote…

Eight hours later, finally, I am drunk with language.  Like Kansas soil, I require such storms for the necessary surplus… for markings to begin to pool, swirl and confuse – for essential destabilization – undoing language from its conventional attachments and turning it toward an alchemy, a natural compound and resource, something to be stirred and sludged or steeped – allowing for aroma, skimming and residue.  Just language, less meaning – an additive experience, unknown potentials of letters combined by some strange combinatory activity of intuition, convention and accident.  Creativity’s luck.

There is a point to drunkenness – whether artificial, of language or pleasure or love, whether substance, experience or drug – it is to be estranged and immersed – in some sense undone.  Renewed.  Despoiled.  It slows and diffuses me enough to write beautifully again.  Instead of making words, to concentrate on shaping letters.  Forces to create.

It is a baffling and bewilderment – allowing us to require effort for focus, selection and choice – so discreet motions of bodies become both complex and marvelous again, the capacity for smell a wonder and delight, communication and gesture (at all) a mysterious gift.

Inebriation levels the field.  Returns to a source.  Baudelaire may have meant we are potential and solidarity at once – flounderers grasping at tools and beginnings, constructing, cooperating.  We are begun.

Perhaps, then, we drink to erase and begin.  We scramble ourselves toward infancy that we might make effort to grow, while minimizing automated meanings.  To struggle to learn, to be becoming rather than operative.  Innovative over automatic.  To develop and realize.

I love to form letters once drowned in the rain of them.

Flood everything to discover what’s possible.

Saturate in order to dredge, to pan, to anticipate.