25 May 2010

Glimpses

My mind is still milling over the DIftW. I'm not even sure it's made of words any more. Every now and again I catch glimpses of how I felt about the world when I wrote them. It's just below the surface, this feeling that I can't communicate, but I can't access it reliably. I have narratives - sophisticated joyful understandings in flow and rhythm - but it is the craft of turning them into something communicable that I do not care for.

I caught a glimpse looking at a workman today as he threw bricks and swore, his arm tattooed with his daughter's name and his eyes desperate: there is nothing slight or passing in the tautology that the world is created in the image of the world. I heard it last night as we walked by the Salvation Army hall and the distant buzzing of the brass switched on my mind. There was the celestial music again, the quest object, the sound more beautiful than anything external could ever be. I have heard music more beautiful than anyone has ever been able to describe. But it is not enough that it is so; it is my unshoulderable duty to externalise it, to codify the colour of creation. This is why I could not make small talk when you were drunk.

I have been dead for six months, maybe more. This winter was an impossible struggle against seemingly nothing. I had to numb myself against the weight. Now I can allow myself to scratch again at it, and I find the colour occasionally under my fingernails. Today and tomorrow I must be as I am now, but today I can once again hope for the day after tomorrow.

It would be easy to fall into hatred for the banality of it all, but I am too calm and too patient for that. So much is rotten.

I guess this attempt proves that it's too early to try to write again.