Wednesday, March 24, 2010

well

It's always a bad sign when a writer quotes a Persian mystic on the uselessness of language. A long silence is usually brooding to bear down.

I haven't been completely useless, but I have lost a certain spark. I've been researching Paul Morphy (Murphy, via Spain and her colonies) a strange New Orleans chess player born two centuries ago.

Research doesn't sit well with me, though I am happy about this project. In truth, I don't know what the great bother is.

I am largely happy with the progress of these prose poems. I am working on my novel again but that is not going well. Belief seems to have deserted me. So much of my life is (has been) geared towards an apprehension of what was wanted. And novels and poems are by definition unwanted. So that's part of it.

It is the first time I have been unemployed and in such money trouble. I can't gauge how much this bothers me endemically, as sometimes I feel like hanging myself and sometimes I feel as though this time is a great gift. But if it is a great gift, I must make the most of it and so frequently I know that I am not. Also the flatness of the tone of my life, resonance coming only from engagement with other people or familiar places, bothers me and I rarely have the energy to keep up with my dear friends as I should, even though every message or visit is like a star in my sky.

And then there is the persistent unreality of this life. My mind has always been prone to such speedy abstraction that it thereby distorts sensation-- and suddenly I am crushed by the weight and noise of the world around me, a room full of people suddenly overcrowded with each person's fears and desires and secrets, every conversation lambent in what should be pitch black noise, grain through the mill, every action impossible, and then when taken, farcical.

We're the punchline but not the joke.

False sounds, false smells, the touch of no one, memories not mine, litanies of despair that live like idols within me, and Time a tangle, events without agency or context, little by little an acquaintance with Evil-- tangible, agile, discreet.

Everything running to the finish. It is the final sprint. I guess I ran cross country so that I might recognize it better.

Which I hated. Torment is not its own reward. To endure is the curse of this life, not its highest aim. Our efforts must be twained with their infinite betters. We must barter our lives for that which will outlive us.

So that's how I'm doing-- stuck at an intersection waiting for the goddamned light to change, more than a little suspicious that I'm in the wrong lane and a few hours late.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I think you're making it a bit too complicated. I'm pretty sure that life is only about just looking at hilariously cute videos like this!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbsSzA6pCB8

my word verification is wation

Unknown said...

"By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man's, I mean." -Twain

Unknown said...

So I could also say that my wation is wation. Confused yet? I totally get it.

now it's vipsyla. Damn.