FROM MY OLD NOTEBOOKS
It is beginning to appear that this Autumn-Winter season will not afford me many, if any, chances to compose writings or work beyond those necessary for school and work. Gradually facing this fact – with reluctance and resistance – yet not wanting this forum simply to cease, I have decided to grab notebooks and loose pages stacked and scattered about my now-dusty attic writing cavern and cull them for writings I don’t feel ashamed of, and which would otherwise most likely never find opportunity to be engaged, read, criticized or perhaps even enjoyed. As always, for what it’s worth… writings…
(IF) I AM A BLIZZARD
He/I/Writer hadn’t mentioned her (you/it/women) before, she had not factored in the memory because the hole was so deep there. Like being from Kansas and not mentioning that you live on the planet Earth. Constituent context.
His four-year-old used words like “conundrum” and “paradox;” said “I’m a particular kind of guy and I need my space.”
Literature, music and art invented Writer.
When snowing it had a way of being everywhere at once.
An infinity of points-of-view. The angles of things.
Language like flakes, like droplets, ice forming on dust, on grains of sand. Memories. When they come back, as they came back, a fuzziness and quiet formed on everything. Accrual of haze. At times difficult to see through. Uncertain. Otherwise unknown. Like prefacing everything with “I am finite and everywhere,” like mentioning (aside) that you are alive on planet Earth.
Like evaporation. What seemed to be there just moments ago.
Concocting one way, then another.
Possible to build with what appear to be concrete blocks, distinct and limited, occupying a space with heft and hardness. Or the voices of birds cawing out over air. Vibrating, in motion, unlocatable like the dark, or “love,” or “fear,” or “joy.”
If I am a blizzard I occur over and across. I extend and then fall (Winter might think). (How “Writer” mimics “Winter”).
A “bird,” a “plane,” a dolphin leaping. (Can/does anything really “leap” without legs?).
“Whiteout.” Dust storm. Memory. History.
Writers’ progeny and progenitors.
Has anything ever really happened? “Occurred”?
The Mimicking Birds are a Message to Bears.
So what (if anything) is known?
First thing, third thing, ninth.
Building a world from “facts” (shape, color, sound, size). What the senses misrepresent or make guesses with: blowing wind. Emotion.
In the midst of the blizzard. What expulsions massive ambiguity. As if blown from a mouth the size of a sun. As if an arrangement that would craft The Great Depression and give birth to someone’s father.
As if Kansas, on planet Earth.
As if the word “me” ever even made a kind of sense.
The dark vacuum of “she,” “her,” “It,” “Other.”
Always an unsolved equation. What holds pursuant consideration. What moving from absence to presence might be like. Things to consider and observe. To take in. Ruminate. Decide. Finitude and consequence (such fearsome things).
How a spoken word thuds a gargantuan typewriting arm onto air. Like thunder. How you are stuck with your language. You open your mouth (Writer thinks) you are shoveling a grave. The chink and thock of it. The bite, the thrust, the throwaway.
The unlocking and the liftaway that sound and sense tend to be. Spoonfuls of soil.
These are very small things. Bitesize or microscopic. Amino acids, molecules.
But we also possess imagination – webs and blankets. Musics from spheres. Scintillating overlays of networks and digitalia. (What the mind can imagine! thinks Writer).
Let’s invent some All-Encompassing. A Universal Meteor Shower, a Snow, a God.
((IF) I am a blizzard).
At times the word “love” feels this way.
Grandiose and miniscule.
- Does it matter if we hasten our deaths – ?
Silly play of interaction. Every single movement that person + person might be (is).
Writer lost in invention: what the mind is capable of: dream, memory, imagination, logic.
Spread it out. Fly away. Expand. Contract. Escape. (Writer tells himself: “let go,” “set it/them free”).
Parachutes and sparrows.
There are scars on Writer’s hands.
And what of scars?
Below her ankle, beneath the eye, down the chest between her breasts, across the hip and back and thigh. The hollows punched into the backs of knees (science must have named it),
How evaluate the residue of wounds?
If I forcibly spread her beautiful nakedest body out over this dining room table, askew and akimbo, that I might insert myself passionately inside her or press and pound into – (what does “physicality” mean?).
Flitting thoughts, mimicking birds, back and forth, to and fro – snow.
**** Interruption. Interference. Intrusion. ****
A blizzard means static. Windstorm. Mindstorm. Deletion and chaos.
Expectation. Writer awaiting. Awaiting letters in mail. Music and language, experience. To breathe is expectancy, anticipation. Another child en route.
Something to live for.
A seven-mile-journey.
In the hopes that someone might read (some fine day) that someone might care, or, after encountering find that they “needed” (or something like it) to continue. Art for the Writer: discovery or uncovering of met needs never known until fulfilled and then absent = Art.
Things human people can give.
A blizzard (words, tones, and touches).
Blizzard – that we are, can be, may
- an inherent isolation
“Person,” Writer thinks.
Person as inherent isolation (or Death again – the Unmattering – the Opposition to meaning). The Void.
What haunts as forever, but actually is “never,” an End.
So go with it. Flow. And then die.
This brief burst of being.
With inevitable conclusion.
Children / Ideas / Actions / Creations / Labor / Life
What is: “Masterpiece” (Absence. Void. Boundary).
An insufficient multiplication. An equation that will not figure. We came. We saw. Deleted. The system crash an accident. Fini. Sweet promise of tomorrow.
This is the arabesque, the frivolous gift. The Enormance – beginning and end. The all that in-between. What is NOW.
All that “then” that is “now.”
Absorbency of blizzard. Precipitate Earth. 6 billion lives falling like snow. Beliefs and experiences, experiments, emotion, hatreds and loves. Veritable shit storm with strange little gusts. Enormity.
A blizzard. A torrent. A wind and a whiteout.
A “blank.”
An ever-approaching storm…of void…
Finitude. Fact.
Limitation.
To begin.
((IF) I am a storm. (IF) I am a blizzard).
07/09/2010
Great writing. Thank you, love, nia
Thank you Nia!
Lovely lovely lovely. Several are the symphonies. A dance of flakes. A moment of crystal floating down. Time and space somehow met somehow understood before flying off..
You are soaring.