I am an outdoorsman of the indoors

-Heidi Julavits-

Maybe I’m meant to be a philosopher – one who asks, observes, thinks + wonders, ponders perspectives, theorizes potential generalities, hopes reports and reflections might “stick” somehow to a wider frame, might be shared, or sound true.  Perhaps that’s sociology, or anthropology, or just the case of being a “social animal” – who could say?

I notice a title, er, there is a title I just saw on the spine of a book loaned to me by the library where I work, en-titled “Gesturing Toward Reality”…which, if we believed it, proves another spine in the pile: “The Primacy of Semiosis.”  If.

Or as if.  Azziff.  As. If.

If that’s how-it-is.

(“How It Is” is also in the stack).

As If That’s How It Is

And So It Begins

Goes

“And so it goes.”

My house is cluttered.  I seem to have a penchant for creators.  Not artistes.  Perhaps the kids wonder.  I task and clean (hardly) in order to order what I can especially whenever anything or everything feels disordered (or I am), but I repeatedly conjoin with those whose vibrancy depends (or seems to) on mess, on possibility and potential, on emergence.  Whilst I career about, disordered and emergent, clinging, striving, desperate for order:  ordered thoughts, ordered words, ordered places, ordered life.  None of which ever even remotely eventuate.

Except perhaps.  Or, as if. 

Still things settle quickly in me.

Crumble, toss, shred, pile or pack anything about, for, with, around me (even my self with my self, or selves) and it funnels, spirals, gathers – most amazingly efficiently! – in fact quite remarkably and chemical-reactiony to a bottom or base – a dredge, a sludge, a collection of chaos quickly finding its way to a murmur – a melancholy.

What would a writer do?  A philosopher?  Musician?  Psychologist?  Lover?  Parent?  Friend?  Any, all of the roles I might enact as parts of my selves?  Or…what would I do?  What might an I made up of me(s) want to do?

That thing [being, organism]…in moments settled and gathered and overwhelmed – feeling steady, calm and helpless in the face of things – MELANCHOLY – “good” I guess (comparatively – a state in which the energy is gone for acting, for performing in the face, presence or need of another)…particularly:

• When the weather is ‘right’ for it (40s & raining)
• When there’s too much or too little to do
• When depleted from something taxing (performances, events, demands, others)
• When certain of scarcity and definite end

The thing wants particular music – “sad songs” (Mark Kozelek, Arvo Part, soundtracks, solo piano or cello); a stable table and sheaf of lined blank papers; a Bic Crystal medium ball-point pen in blue or black; 1-3 hours uninterrupted; endless drink equal parts vodka, tonic and 100% grapefruit juice; a cigarette or two; loose layered clothing; and an outside for the inside to poke around in I guess, to hazard (haphazardly). 

That’s what I do.

Time and space, a melancholy, a setting…

or sex,

a vital moisty intimacy with (and only with) the one I love,

desperately (unfortunately) need, desire, crave, wish for…

So – to write.

To leak in a hesitant line.  Ink.

To see if the liquid residue scraping looping shapes across light blue lines of snowy-white notebook pages might in-scribe, in-form, make my inchoate choate – make the amorphous and disordered shapely and full, meaningful, possible.

Whether I might accept, discern, agree with something that makes its journey through the networks and passageways that apparently compose me

that might result in something I recognize or comply with, if even only

– like these are the times I stare neither at the bush with its waving tendrils, nor the fence poles they move against, but somewhere in between –

if even only [syn. for withholding judgment] (my drafts are filled with these) to hear the unknown or misremembered word

nothing in focus but an unlabelable feeling

which I call (when required) – “melancholy” –

defining for me something calm, dank, pure, correct –

a sieved and all-accounted-for awareness –

before some crazed and passionate outburst or heat, some diversion of this otherwise apparent cold, wet, burn.

The word I can’t recall (that I need) begins with a “c.”  Or perhaps an “a” or “ad-.” 

Or maybe something else among its 26 options.  25 really, I use so few that begin with “z.”

**********************************

Lael asks for statistical proof of decreased attention spans while I get bored of expression, description, “tack”…change the color of my pen and wonder why the average popular song is 3-5 minutes long but novels normally run past 100 pages.

It would seem that we all just want to be and be loved, however we verbalize it.

I still haven’t remembered that word…and refuse to utilize thesauri or Google.  Or any alternate synonym finder.

Our value lines seem so personal and arbitrary and irrational (philosopher?  Anthro-socio-psycho-logist?).

I want to be intimate with my partner.

In such a way.

In such a way that she understands, comprehends, – EXPERIENCES – how significant, important, crucial, essential

she really (REALLY)

IS

to me

to ‘a’ “me.”

Being.

This rambling ridiculous writing

is all, actually, thoroughly,

another misguided attempt to communicate.

Truly or in reality

That I exist in order to be a “me” in relation to a “you.”

Quite simply.

It weighs nothing

bears no responsibility

It’s simply.

I marry you (again).

I am.  A “folded clock.”

among billions.

If even only undeterminedly, undecided, uncertain, unsure, debatable, dubiously, [all synonyms for withheld judgments].

Not least among the spines arrayed before me: Complexity – My Struggle – The Erotic Phenomenon – Reviving the Living – Experiencing & The Creation of Meaning – Things Merely Are – Intertwingled – and Love.

**********************************************

It occurs to me in matters of most everything that I need / demand / require CONTINUAL PROOF for something – for me – to count as “true” or “actual” – things have to be perpetually evidenced.

Nothing is…but…well…that’s why I trust in death.