I’m good at going underground– somnolent and meditative for stretches at a time, drawn to quiet compellingly, as to water for solving itchiness, to bed when harried and jagged, to soothing smoothnesses for the relief of wear of ordinarily days. adrift and too often spinning in my well of leaves and assorted meandering flotsam, odd considerations float to the surface and grow momentarily compulsive– mainly thoughts of people I have known and loved, now distant in various ways, for different reasons. e.m. forster is reminded to me by a facebook acquaintance (the term “friend” exhausted by overuse in this medium):
Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.
I believe the work I do in this well of quiet consists in stitching up dispersed fragments of self into a more coherent whole, or at least a larger and more consonant piece– structuring alterations to the suit of self, tucking it here, letting it out there, adjusting so the skin of identity, outgrown or stretched, fits right once more. necessary, centering work. and yet there is an implicit irony in the disconnection seemingly requistite to the process– a pattern that traverses the ground back and forth between states of ragged psychic dispersal on the one hand and on the other isolation and disconnect from the warp and weft of social fabric.
a-spin and muddling, I find generous occasion for nostalgia– that golden retrospect that paints memory the fleeting luminance of dawns and dusks, a gilding inherent to transitional instants but lengthened and rendered more apparently permanent in the construction of the internal narrator. and so I relive momentary occasions of comradeship (themselves, to be sure, tiny islands in the slosh of reality once upon) and imagine almost that I’ve lost or forfeited or mislaid or otherwise squandered some more enduring state of connection. when in fact, perhaps, it is all episodic, inconsistent, occasional, and prone to stretches of drag punctuated by shining, resonant bursts of clear being.