I can't now conceal my thoughts in verse. Which I can never do very well, anyway. It's exactly 2.30 as I begin writing this and I'm awake for no good reason. Well, the reason was good. But no, but yes, but let me continue. Ulysses is beside me, still lodged on page sixty-six. I have to reach page seven-one-eight by Tuesday. I was supposed to be reading it, but I let myself get distracted. I turned to face away, and the song I set to play, spun me down the stairs, and cast me unawares. I returned to this chair and sat and spoke.
The silent words we say in fingers against a keyboard. Why do I say them here when I wouldn't say them if I had to press them through my lips? Lips. I long for lips. That is part of the problem. I sit and am stirred ("for a bird,--the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!"), and should learn to quell the tell-tale beat. Because games are played by the few, but still there are rules to life which transcend toying. I define my life by trying to break its fourth wall. I was told this once, in my mock-Oxford-interview. And it has stuck with me. I'm pushing reality as if I were a fictional character and I am simply toying with its meanings and its words. I am the product of an internal struggle to get the things I want in 'reality', the safe way, and this other timeless desire to make everything mean nothing by pressing upon meaning.
I feel like I've come to some great cathartic epiphany and write without certainty that I will publish this. The things I never publish are always the best. Do I destroy the quality of the pouring of my soul if it's edited to suit an audience? Could some terrible disaster - worse than the one which awakens my existential crisis - be incited by its genesis? ("Poets are not so scrupulous as you. Nowadays, a broken heart can run to many editions.") I think, I think, I think. I sit and think and think too much but never enough about the things I should be doing but rather I think to analyse the words in ways they were never meant to be. And then, the attached issue, is that I hope the other person can read words as I write them and see in them what I want them to see. The double-meaning, the no-meaning, the differing meaning - and then further still do unlike me and answer with conviction; "Yes! And where these meanings contrast, dissolve and collide, I say yes to all."
What is man if not the product of his fears, his desires, his attempts at being something else and efforts to stifle the thing within. The love that dear/dare not speak it's name, Joyce tells of Wilde's; but none dare speak any name, Wildean or Shakespearian. Never for me, anyway. In the act of naming we do so wrong! Naming takes identity. Naming takes the truth. Naming bubbles the meaning to the surface and adds so much to what was there before. How often a poem is changed by its title to some other twisted meaning not in its text - the title is only to place this thing, this thing (THING! the best word in the English language, I DECLARE!) within a box of glass, at an arm's length, in particular lighting and with tinted spectacles. The distortion does not affect our comprehension of the reality if we focus! But focusing brings us in closer to the reality. REALITY. WHERE DO I STAND? (In reality.) I mean, am I here, toying with words and asking the unaskable and because I wish to change the course of the novel, to make Dharma & Greg of what could be Dickens?
Oh salty, vague, and deliberate. HOW I HAVE MISSED YOU.
But here, with your company again, I remember why I was so glad you disappeared from my heart.
This is the blog of pain! Pain I cannot describe.
Pain owed to no particular, no man, no woman, not even myself but certainly mine. Its genesis, my own. GENESIS: said twice before now. Why does this word sit in my skull? WHY DO I ASK IF IT DOES? WHY AM I TAKING MY THOUGHTS AND TRYING TO FIND OUT "WHAT IS LIAM THINKING?" I am thinking my own thoughts but I wish were two people. One on the couch and one in the chair. One to listen and one to speak and then afterwards, make silent.
I am elated with a joy, or was, or can be. I am now not in the throes of time. But now I am, because I glance to the clock; how time has taken my mind to its corner for these constant numbers: 2.53. Where comes the four? Now. As if sensing my expectation of it. Do people think like clocks? So rhythmically yet circular, mechanical and unthinking yet with so much unintended profundity? Do we mean the things we say we mean? Life, brings life, brings life. What of death? What is death?
I need a drink. 2:55.
No comments:
Post a Comment