One of the many reasons (words-turned-to-meanings) he’s tattooed on my veins…
Category: life
9 Notebooks
In an act of rebellion and a kind of self-serving exorcism or slate-clearing (what blog is NOT an attempt at an entity’s expression, communication?), and facing the duress of weeks burdened with commitments and inescapable responsibilities…[in other words]…I intuit I am encountering a “time” (weeks / months / foreseeable futures?) that I deduce as laden – somehow preordained – for preoccupations of employment, previously established obligations – freighted with encumberances complexly negotiated…[under pressure I compose]…and so I search for a project [as is my way] that is FOR ME[?] (something autotrophic, self-cannibalizing and nourishing at once, individually comprised and contained) an insurrection and defiance honoring self [so I surmise] facing compulsion…
…and I unearth these 9 Notebooks…all aborted undertakings from the past 12 months…via which I propose to mount mutiny by posting all that seems potentially warranted in them [upon re-reading as if the first time, long forgotten]…toward little other purpose than for purging, opening, erasing – a clearinghouse of efforts – that might evolve toward some novel substitution, unforeseen modification, development, emergence…
“this is what directs him to learning – where he may encounter fragments of his own existence,
fragments that are still within the context…”
– Walter Benjamin on Franz Kafka –
There will be stories, concepts, poems, characters, reflections, essays…and ephemeral scraps like these…
- think feel – attune to meaning – reflect and refract
- befriend your body, take care with your mind
- be gentle, be open. move fluidly, breathe
- go alert to your dreams
- wish more than hope, walk don’t run, run sometimes
- be careful of rules, they’re always changing, it’s the nature of the rule, the measure, the standard
- keep your eyes and ears open, along with heart and mind – only let things close into pleasure and pain – and that more of a wince
- don’t be afraid of your story – write and rewrite it, edit and revise, revise, revise, and write it again
Ash grey little body only upright heart beating face to endlessness. Old love new love as in the blessed days unhappiness will reign again. Earth sand same grey as the air sky ruins body fine ash grey sand. Light refuge sheer white blank planes all gone from mind. Flatness endless little body only upright same grey all sides earth sky body ruins. Face to white calm touch close eye calm long last all gone from mind. One step more one alone all alone in the sand no hold he will make it.
– Samuel Beckett, Lessness –
Distractedly riffling through old notebooks stacked, shelved and scattered about my working space, some dating to 1991.
For most of my life I’ve desired to be a writer.
Nearly all of my life I’ve been writing.
Reading. Writing. Reading. Writing. Reading. Writing. Thinking.
Once out of the home, off on my own, out in the world,
the marginalia and doodles, notes in the headers and footers,
grew redundant with desire…
…desire for language to do some certain things,
…desire to be a certain sort of sayer, singer:
to write the ambiguities.
Repeatedly: to be a writer of “the grey,” “the foggy,” the layered and the liminal. Experience thickly translucent, ambivalent, inconclusive and unclear. That light in which even our shadows go unseen.
Yet over time, enduring work, assembling children, compiling experience, occasioning love and its passing by,
encountering mortality in its consistent accumulation of extraction,
my writing desire grows more active,
toward the active,
and its happening,
writing verbally,
writing living:
to write losing.
Losing in its agility and operation, its perpetuity.
Losing as it eventuates and proceeds, universally, in each instant.
TO WRITE LIVING : LOSING
to loose losing
…perhaps to lose it…
…face to endlessness…
will he make it?
Impromptu
Death.
Abundance.
Extravagant generosity of depletion.
Lust with which the world gives way.
And life.
Things.
Prominence.
.
I have entered a world
in which I am
saddened
begladdened
nostalgic
and eaten away
.
It is “Today”
this world –
the realm, the sphere, the moment:
Now.
A time that’s never,
only almost
and a just-was.
.
Each beginning
what equals
another end.
That time.
What was.
What will be.
What I remember
and predict.
.
The first day
once again;
each possibly
the last
.
It is like this –
each time –
it is the present:
that attachment
that letting go.
Incessant welcome,
and its goodbye.
FYI – in margins
Although nearly silent, or, too busy to conjure and compose, or…
I have not given up, having not ceased,
somewhere in the mix of these,
somewhere between voices…
ASPECTS OF WRITING
To 2015, then
“Great changes in life are always a help…”
-Fyodor Dostoevsky-
A STEP AT A TIME
Now one eye daylight
and one not
there was a lifetime
before they flew
their true colors
but I must have known
the moment I was born
the pans of the balance
swinging along with me
always two poles
with the seasons rocking
between them
.
and the familiar the unexplored
the city the country
abroad almost at home
and home never quite there
just the way it was before
.
left foot right foot
on the same way
my own way
of finding and losing
and in my own time
coming to one
love one place
day and night
as they came to me
.
but the knowing and the rain
the dream and the morning
the wind the pain
the love the burning
.
it seems you must let them come
so you can let them go
you must let them go
so you let them come
– W. S. Merwin
All my Words are Silent 