It’s hypnotic.  Illogic.  You may recall genetic components – a sentiment, experience, curiosity or sensation…the fabrication begins its own spells.  That plane where you drift from expression or fractaling inquiry toward Medium.  When plot is played out and the voices keep talking.  Or some other member begs a word.

You are no longer quite “author.”  When it begins I’m usually puzzled or amazed.  A vague and shifty core obsesses and eludes me.  I ponder awhile, do research, spawn a dialogue or few with available others…but eventually turn to writing.  A word inscribed in secret not only leads to more, but ricochets through spacetime like a pinball.  The versions of the brain call out over the callosum:  “Felt anything like this before?  Have we had an experience that resonates?” / and / “Say – it seems I’m in the midst of something – check it out!  Any words in your concordance for such as this?”  To and fro – attemps to signify and symbolize, reify, rectify, making truce with our immersion.

The “language drill.”  As it burrows metaphor, it fragments and splinters dust around the edges.  Retrieving as it leads.  Recalling through invention.  I use my handwriting to find out.   To find out.  Searching something, spelunking expeditions, a nettling curiosity blind-feeling hunches and perceptions.  Pulling them towards words in attempts to trick them into trap.  Building tunnels, margins, stairwells to aim the lights at.  As if  broad enough term-corrals might lasso and then spiral, slowly cinching it round, whatever “it” is.

But whoa then, hold on!  Once a breadcrumb trail’s discerned, it forges.  Makes its rhinoceric way in accrual and erasure.  Constructing as you follow, conundrum’d and deleting.  A word – and sources cling like filaments.  None of them accurate and all informing.  History, culture – traditions.  Intimate pain and joy.  Perception, conception and query.  Discovering bewilderment.  Creating the unsaid.

Victim and perpetrator both, you, author, artist, song.  Skewing and distorting in equal measures.  Changing as you change it.  This is the making.  The being-made.  Creator and created both.  The artist in her medium.

There is no “having done.”  Failure or not, it virals and contaminates.  The path is incompletion.  “The Artist’s Way…”  Never through, until it’s through with you, coincident with a life.

Who do we say that we are?