the task eroded

The task eroded. The weather picked back up and left us stranded. 

A radical idea has a great chance of starting at one and running itself through the range of two through infinity. Most often one hundred is not reached and fifty is a common average. Radical ideas require a radical departure, and departing from the normal is the most pervasive and sticky issue. 

I would rather not care about story, to tell the truth. I think there are ways to craft and expose without the form. Yes, it would be harder and no one would want to read it. Story is how we understand the world, and readers would like to understand what they pick up and put in their hands. But these days, I feel strongly against it and want to create a sound to feel like a splotch, like the remains of the sunset or desire. Getting there by plot is impossible. 

Steel shards, fast brick walls, high windows, the inside of a heart born into industry. 

Carpeted floors, wall to wall, stainless appliances, tidy bathrooms, matching chairs, the inside of a mind born to comfort. 

Hopkins strained to put the emotion on the page. Realization after realization, failure after failure, he used the beats of his vernacular to protect himself and his acts against utter disaster. To protect himself against his faith. Half the world away the pagans were winning and the lights were decreasing over the water.

Look at the stars! Look, look up at the skies!
O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air! 
The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!
Down in the dim woods the diamond delves! The elves’-eyes!
The frey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies!
Wind-beat whitebeam! Airy abeles set on a flare!
Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare! — 
Ah well! It is a all a purchase, all is a prize.

Following this task, association after association, line after line, details emerge to make a crystal backed point. Here is the trial of the century: my own efforts in conjunction with what could be expected. Then there is the lie, the one I tell myself each and every day when I sit down to write: this is worth it. For it is, and it isn’t. I miss the prose, but no one else does. My search is relevant, yet it affects no other mind. Not yet, the little voice says in the tired parts of the brain, not yet. And I lean gayly into the task, wishing it were real, a wooden thing, in brass and ardor. 

The order starts to matter about halfway down the page, does it not. The ideas start to take shape about three paragraphs into page two, then form into a whole on page three. It would be easier to start on page one with page four, but then, what does that mean for page one? The words taking me there aren’t always the words that stay. They will be missed. I plant a road side cross to their passing. I plant a chrysanthemum in the yard, below the window through which I stare out into the field, and the ocean beyond, in honor of their work in carrying me across the gulf. 

In ways I loved them, as one loves young people when young, as parts of oneself exposed, as characters of you as yet unseen. Then they take on an air of staleness. I start to hate them. They were never working well enough. They would not fit into the order I imagined. They never stood and sang as I commanded. Like the left over shells of oysters, I put them into the beds to nourish the soil. The calcium brine seeps into the loam, and the perennials feed off their passing. I look out and remember them, but not what they were, not their meaning or sound, but the longing I had for them. 

I start to be lavish when I am tempted to care too much. I put on layer after layer of color, yellow, red, orange, and green, until their is a neutral grey I wasn’t seeking. I overwork the edges and ruin the form. I step into an abstraction I love, but no one else can tell one form from another. I fall into a meaninglessness no one else can feel. 

Paint over paint, word over word, charcoal with charcoal, ink beside ink. 

Further paths veer to the left. 

Motion starts to blur on the horizon. 

I avoid reading the greats for good reasons. When I started reading Ulysses I started thinking in the staggered and flowery prose. I started hearing Dedalus in my head and wondering when the fellas were going to round the corner and see me. I feel dizzy in the wake and seek enough difference in style to maintain a plain thought of my own. I take the reading slowly, in short pages instead of long reads, to maintain the innocence of my tongue and to start describing the world as myself, not the men in books of yore. 

The hope for more than random thoughts is interesting. Halving the great particles we own, creating the forms that seek both ends — start and finish —, fighting for creatures that have yet to be named, these are valid pursuits. But the sitting down and taking down the randomness cannot be so, yet here we are. I feel there should be something about neurobiology here. I see this snippet explaining what I am saying. The brain is so ready to act, so ready to know, it never really sleeps and when it does, there are avenues it takes to figure out the world while we think we are resting. Dreams said in another way. However it starts or stands, there is a magic to the lyricism. I fall into it. I stare it down. I seek it. 

Hold your breath fair child, the wind is blowing and the dust is high. Put your plugs in and dive, hold your breath fair child. 

The end of time will come with terms and sequences. It will come in paces and steps. We expect the bang and lift of the ground and the patterns to emerge. Ezekiel will be wrong. The wheel will remain suspended. The symbols will rot into one another and the edge of the world will be revealed. It is a half step away from us all. 

The real thoughts I’ve been trying to form are tangled in the mix of a denatured place. I am abroad, away from the daily life, suspended between coming and going, having great leaps yet to reach for and not wanting to return. 

I’ve come away from this and have started to peel. 

Fighting for the end of the naming process. 

Wondering why the starts and finishes sound like they do. 

I happen to love the manner in which I panic. First it starts as a slow build. The fire bursts into the blood and the first impulse is to ignore it, stay calm, suppress the will. Then it starts to feel uncontrollable. There is tangling of wires, the buzz of the energy, the pace of things picking up and exploding in tune. I find the lights brighter. The sounds become more accentuated. I am also lost, as lights, sights, and sounds blur into a pitiable stew. Panic lays its hand on me and there is nothing to do but look all around and wonder why this one thing is taking place. I strive for solutions and boundaries, and finding none, collapse into an endless pool. 

The edge is coming ever closer. Right up until there are caverns and creeping men, there are bitter envy and capable followers. Here are the men we seek in pictures. There are the women we need by name. 

Then the failure stalks prey like an albatross. I slink below the green folds of the pasture, pretending I am hidden when the great bird swoops down from above ands screams me into being a moment before being extinguished. Greatness in the fading second. 

Sometime in the great morning, there is a patience waiting to be tapped. Until that time the slow creeping panic, my panther, my friend, is in charge. 

          Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Starlight Night