That is the nature of the split in me. by nature i am dream-oriented. irrational, wordless, quiet, unformed. but i am also compelled to examine and explicate; it is also my nature to want to know why: to find meaning as the cliche goes. of late, i regard this latter aspect as a most certain liability – the compulsion of one who can’t stand emptiness: the inexplicable void-splendor-terror of being.
so maybe this is wisdom and foolishness both: i am doing what i can to get at the marrow, to get at the poetics. and poetics are so much more than words. words are buried in it. yes words are buried in the substrate of it and i am just trying to find ways to frame a few gleaming pieces that have come to the surface. to carve away and polish up just enough to ring sublime, to emerge just a little, but not pull away too much, from that essential substrate.
i know that i am still too tentative. too personally offended by ‘mistakes’. mistakes. ie. something that does not literally serve my intent. i posit that the concept of mistake, in this context at least, is a highly egotistical one. one that assumes that I I I know the way.
if i can see any certainty about my life, it is that something other than literal plans and plots has got me to the essential places. my plans are a metaphor for the impossible tasks the gods set to heroes. these tasks are always accomplished by some magic or other.
slowly i work to knit the things that magnetize me. to bring them into a cohesive spell. a spell of texture and shape and language that is the antidote to i-don’t know what. not yet. because there is the deliberate born of external looking–self-conscious looking–smelling of struggle and cliche.
and then
a quite different deliberate born of internal looking: the witness that recognizes rhythm and fluidity and correspondence and speaks wabi-sabi: doing so in deference to internal and secret climates, felt responses. intimacy with unfolding, a conduit to the root–this human-self-body-experience.