It's A Wonder We Can Even Feed Ourselves

There is a blank page and it is staring at me expectantly. It is rather difficult to find words when there is no one to look at them and respond to them and tell you how they feel about them. There was a time once when someone did that, when someone stared back with knowledge of words and writers and I suppose at the time he never really did say anything that brilliant. I suppose, if I really think about it objectively and not forgivingly and with pity and regret, that he rarely was able to say anything very distinctly, very definitively. And I made him purposefully into a hollow shell, a hidden ghost but then, suddenly, unexpectantly, he became a mocking, vibrant reality and he was there infront of me and I ran, afraid of crying, into the darkness. I returned and there was an empty chair to look back at me and instantly I regretted running. Instantly, I regretted pretending to smile, trying to smile despite such fear of a flood of feverish sobs. Perhaps it was my own lack from the beginning. Perhaps I expect so much of people and then they are afraid because they don't think they can live up to my expectations. But, maybe I set the same expectations for myself and that is why I think it is simple for other people to achieve them. I try so hard to write and to grow in writing that it was so foreign to me that someone who was as talented as he was could just be so lazy about it and never really finish anything. And I thought that I might help him, that I might give him feedback which was engaging and real and it would inspire him to write and to finish things. But, I painted myself into a corner and I lost the only person who ever understood how I feel about words. Though, I say that I lost him, it seems almost that I never really had him and I poured myself into the situation so openly and so honestly and so beautifully (until the end, when I got drunk and ugly) and that he never did once react the way that I wished he would. And I never did understand what he wanted from me.

The Storms Of Time's Swords. Letter 4.

These letters are responses to letters published on The Exquisite Thread (the link can be found to the right). In case you were wondering.

Dear______,

It is rare to find a heart filled with want, insular and hollow and yet still beating so steadily, so passionately. You make such grave and solemn claims, to forsake that with which you feel, touch and see, and yet there is a deep irony which lives within the weight of your emotions and which betrays the very words with which you claim this darkness. Perhaps you fade into the muddy depths of dumb dreams but those are not the dreams of an unborn child; they are the dreams of someone lost in life, afraid to accept the burden of the gift he has been given but which is so hard to give back.

The proof that we are alive lies in everything around us and in our ability to perceive it and to make it something new, something with our own reflection glancing back at us, hidden just beneath the surface of the universal. My heart beats irradiatively, flecks of lambent light aflame inside my chest. I try to fill the swelling space which you so definitively describe with the beauty of words and sounds and sights. When I stare into a sky alight with the summer sun and awash with the billowing clouds, I find that there is little need to peer over into the space within a space at the center of all things. And even when I am overcome with the immeasurable depravity of the human condition, I never find other people arbitrary. It is when I am mired most deep in disgust for the sins of the individual that I look to others for solace. I look to others but I also look inside myself.

I live in the hope that our words will one day sustain someone the same way that Shelley's and Shakespeare's words have sustained me and you too, my dear. Your words also sustain me and each time we finish fleshing out these thoughts and making them words, I breath a heavy sigh of relief that something was expressed and understood and will be remembered. I am happy to be a bastion, a citadel to hold strong against the storms of time's swords. What better use of these words than to cushion the beams in the walls of one's heart. For that is surely what your words do for me; it is what the best words achieve. I will use your words to remind me that I am not the only one who seeks to say things long since left unheard, that you too absorb and reform the world's words and make them your own.

These letters, though beautiful, do conceal a certain simplicity. The ease with which we've been able to leap into these letters after such a long silence is, I think, not quite clear. There is so much detailed inward focus and so little of the drab and daily. Tell me what you do when you are not writing me lenghty, lovely letters. Tell me how you came to write me again after so many voiceless years. Disclose some lost, hidden secret and I will as well.

Unveiled,
_________________

Spider's Silk. Letter 2.

Yes,________,

The silence between us has always glowed in the fiery furnaces of my recent recollections. I spend my days in memories, often lost amidst a frenzied sea of faces, weaving in and out of the pulse of normal life. I struggle to maintain the same self-assured attitude which you so easily spout but I am not so quick to compare my escapades to those of an immortalized Ithacan king. Your name frequently finds itself a fertile home in the folds of my thoughts. Memories crown themselves rulers of my mind and long nights are spent chasing the past in circles down roads I never thought I'd find again.

Together we frolicked through the pathways of our past and time and again we've discussed all the things we did and all the things we did wrong. There will always be things which could have changed and we always want to be given the chance to do it again. But, we continue to absorb into each other and it seems like no matter how hard you try to build an inner life, there will be someone with whom you have to live an outward life. Sometimes my outward life is a lie and the life which reveals itself through brief and simple daydreams is more honest and true than anything said to another person.

I, too, remember when we dove directly into that deep, blue beyond. We didn't stop to look over the edge together, simply nodded and ran: our faith fraught with a faint horror but still smiling. We soared down the plateau, towards some unknown undiscovered future. You said it perfectly when you described the window pane quivering as it spasmed beneath the strength of the wind. We understood it then, even above the knowledge that we were shifting apart, that the world beneath us was wavering on the brink of a sudden shift.

Our lives interweave like layered webs and we struggle through different degrees of entanglement. Sometimes it seems we are wrapped up and waiting to lay victim to some unseen but hoovering Shelob who hangs eagerly in the shadows for the right time to strike. Other times we are falling through many stretched out cotton webs, slipping farther and farther into the depths. When you write to me I feel as though I am at the bottom of that dark well, staring up into a brightly lit sky obscured by the gossamer membranes woven, back and forth between the walls. I see your face at a distance but I know that you are only going to stay long enough to make me wonder what could have been.

We will always meet again, friend, within the weightless wanderings of ancient Ithacans or entwined in the spiders' silk of the skies. I will always find you peeking out at me from the edges of deep woods or from the shimmering surface of the sea and I will know that you think of me when your heart folds in your chest and you need to find a reason for things. Our lives and all of the other lives have all faded into the constant song of the past, as do all things but the persistent sea and the lands laden with history. So much has made it through the fire and ash of the centuries and even things long buried eventually find their way to the surface, to tell their stories or to inspire a new ones. You can follow mistrals or The Tramontane, you can roam the Rhone and beyond but you will always find the same thing when you look out into a clear sky or threatneing clouds. You will always find your self, seeking out something in the great beyond, a small thing, staring out at a steadily shifting world and trying to keep up with it's stirring.

Don't let the ash settle where it falls.
Frequently,
_________

June 28th 08 A Dream

There was a company which manufactured a way to turn people into weird mutant fighting machines. It happened naturally when this toxin they released into the air interacted with eggs on the beach. The eggs grew into scary demonic things that ate little kids. I was trying to get away from where this was happening. There was a university on the beach and they had decided to let the creatures take over and they were going to invent some way to turn people into robot demons. Each person took on a different form that they could use to their advantage. I was trying to sneak in to talk to the people in charge by pretending that I had invented some kind of special pill. All the guards were watching me but they were also wearing matching outfits and playing speed poker. I was running away again and they were trying to get Kody. I was running into other people's houses to try to distract them from knowing where he was. They had turned my Dad into a weird tornado that swallowed up whatever they asked. 

Goats and Eh.

The wind outside is howling and the sky is waiting to crack. The pressure is building in my head and the humidity is stifling. I've been living inside myself, waiting for something to break me free from my inner dialogue. I've been promising to write and not doing it; I've been promising myself several things which have all been left undone. I read and speak and eat in order to maintain a life and I create in order to somehow keep a record of this life. Each day that passes without words pressed to the paper is a day that falls into the masses of un-recalled, half-lived moments. I want to make something real out of the days so that I can look back on them and know that I spent them well. So that when I am old and tired and finished I can look back on my life and know that I have made something that is important to someone, that I have succeeded in at least capturing something about life with words and images. 

Some days all the things I see I see in words. I see a tree and I spell it out in my head: T-R-E-E. And I think sentences about the tree. "The tree stood by the side of the road, beckoning with it's massive branches as it swayed in the summer wind." I make associations with other trees of my life, experiences involving trees and climbing them and picking their fruits. And other days all the things I see I see in images. I see the tree and I photograph it from different angles and I photograph the different parts. My eyes will constantly search for a balanced image and I see things as lines and within a frame. And on the days inbetween I just look at things and see them and I don't think about them in words or try to force them into images. Those days make me anxious because I want to always be in the midst of making something and I fear I am always in the midst of explaining why nothing is being made. 

Happiness is often like a brief respite between other emotions. It carries with it a sense of intoxication and it is often the littlest things that make me the happiest. Yesterday, while driving down a rather windy road, we turned a corner and I saw, so briefly, several goats munching away on green, lush grass. We passed them so quickly that I barely had time to think before a squeal escaped my lips and I was awfully pleased. How I love goats. The knowledge of their existence is one thing that makes me extraordinarily happy. Ah, goats. 

I digress. 

I want to go to the ocean. I want to swim out as far as I can and float on the surface of the water and look up at the sky. But, everytime I do so I am afraid of sharks. Especially after last time I went to the beach and was quite close to a shark before I realized that people had fled the water and everyone was standing out on the beach looking in my direction. I only saw the shark after I swam back to shore but it was right where I had been. There are a lot of things like that in life, it seems. Things you don't understand are dangerous because they are too close and it is not until you see them from a distance that you realize your mistakes. 

I was reading through my notebook of dreams recently and I realized that all of my dreams involve people who have been in my life in the past or the present but mostly the past. I cannot let go of people no matter how hard I try. But, I suppose I don't try very hard, do I? I am terribly sorry that this post is so stupidly personal and it doesn't have all the grandiose statements about living and dying, about creating and not doing so. There are just so many things in my head all at once and I hate being in the middle of something and waiting for it to happen. 

There are about to be many changes happening. Already they have begun. My writing partner and roommate and closest friend of six years has ceased to live with me for the first time. I am still getting used to it. It was all rather sudden and I am still unsure as to when I will see her again. I fear that I did not do the things I should have done to help her in the ways that I could. But, I believe in her and I know that we will once again write together like we did before and that we will both learn a great deal by forging for ourselves and doing what is necessary. 

Ah. Well, at least something was written, eh? 

Sharks.

There is a bit of a struggle on the brink of a new beginning. There is always that little voice that tells you that it is easier to simply stay the same. I am making an attempt to do things for more than just myself but part of me feels that I ought to do things just for myself for a change. Regardless, I am making this brief and painless leap into another place, into living for at least another year in Baltimore but at the same time I am spending three months in Honduras and I suppose all things considered, having a nice place to come home to after three months abroad is worth the four months that I will have to spend in this country when I return. Three and a half months in the new house, three months in Honduras (maybe four) and four and a half more months in the new house and then we shall see where we stand.

I miss when I used to have the time to sit and write and think. There is too much stress involved with moving and finding a house. I hate packing and cleaning and searching and considering what it would be like to live somewhere. Maybe if I had a zillion dollars I would like to go around and look at all the houses with lovely pools and several decks and a house that would be mine. But, I hate looking at places to rent.

I am a Pisces. All I want to do is swim in the ocean. But, not just swimming: lounging and laying and reading. In the ocean. God. I miss the ocean. But, also. I'm rather scared of sharks.

A Blog for the Sake of Blogging.

There's been yet another cloudy day with only a brief and sudden peeking of the sun through the clouds. I spent the majority of the morning and well into the afternoon in bed, dreaming strange dreams influenced by His Dark Materials. The blinds in my bedroom were not glowing with the sun screaming through them and so I felt no need to get out of bed. This is how I determine whether I should rise from the sheets: if the sun is warm and bright I am inspired and excited to face the day, if not I'd rather live in dreams. For, they are so vivid and colorful. I dreamed last night that I was trying to save a young boy and I had to slip through several worlds which was only achieved by leaping through a mirror and when I did this it made a very loud swooshing, suction sound. I was in several different houses which I had arrived in by way of the mirrors. I was trying to find as many mirrors to move through as fast as possible and I felt that I could save the boy if I got away from the group of younger people chasing me.

It's strange because I read a lot more of His Dark Materials than I had read last night and there are many parallels which I was unaware of until I read it. I read most of The Subtle Knife today and when I had the dream I knew that in the book there were windows into another world but there were long scenes of a murderous group of children chasing the protagonists and they had to move through several worlds back and forth to escape. I remembered my dreams more vividly as a result of reading the book and there were some parallels which were unexplained. Perhaps there was some subconscious foreshadowing which I picked up on. Anyway, His Dark Materials is no Harry Potter but it is at least slightly entertaining if a bit boring and one dimensional (no pun intended).

The sun is warm and bright today and I rose rather early and wandered about the roof, soaking in the sudden sun, dodging bees and wondering when all those flowers on the tree that hangs over onto my roof ever did start to bloom so brilliantly. I've been trying to set things up to go to Honduras to volunteer in November and things are coming together pretty solidly. I am sure to have excellent learning and finally travel from this godforsaken country.

I am so tired of it here. I just want to explore new things, think in a new language, interact with people who are not Americans, who are deeper and more cultured and who actually enjoy the act of thinking and learning and living.

I love to feel the light wind on the back of my neck, to sigh softly beneath the sun, to read wonderful and wistful words while the breeze blows by. I miss the sun and long days beneath the shade of a nice tree. I want to travel through foreign lands and do whatever I wish for as long as I intend. And I have saved up the money to do so which is something rather impressive for me because I was never good with saving or with patience or with limitations on things. When I have money I want to spend it. But, now I have the ability to do whatever I want to do and while it's rather freeing it is also a bit frightening. But, I don't really have the ability to do whatever I want because now I have to go to work.