Author: sat

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file under: how many metaphors can you hurl at an elusive thing?

aka, hot mess.

“what would be so terrible about not doing the things you’re trying to do?”

indeed at some point the effort seems specious– one has to wonder sooner or later. and yet attempting to address it stumps me.

“what would be so bad about just writing for yourself? no one else to read it– you could write just whatever you want.”

impatience with the process shoulders its way forward through all those shoulds, all the while envying the anatomy model for its detachable head– which saying out loud shows seams and stray threads. nightly reunions with daytime wits neither tidy or methodical.

“maybe you’re just not a writer, in that way.”

ouch. but right. … or simply in process perhaps (whatever that might mean.) wrangling with the judge who sits up top, comparing this and that, busily finding wanting, colorblind to differences betwixt tree fruits. and furious. mean little footstomper, greedy for the next arresting, authentic instance, urging to be convinced and content. only perpetual reinvention complete with throes seems sufficient, if less than entirely tasteful or pleasant for the participants.

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whazup over he-ah

lotta silence in this little corner of the webs, I know.

when the navelly head grows too fraught, as it tends to do in turbulent periodic bouts, otherwise verbal volubility sinks into great morasses of (invisibly thrashing) silence. so this spring has been– and winter before that, and fall before that– a long season underground. some kind of transitional time, creative soil lying fallow and percolating, psychic skies overcast with dark and gruesome (self-generated) cloud cover, blusters howling, life huddled and hunkered down, all a-shiver. in the midst of which the outer world’s floral hoopla and verdant explosion of leaf only serve as insult to the injury of inner drought.

so a coupla weekends back I was poking around an andersonville thrift store while chris got his hair cut, picking up this and that in the perpetual search for, most likely, some existential explanation not to be found in chipped dishware and secondhand bloomers, when lo and behold there on a shelf sat a little red boxed set of audio cassettes for The Artists’ Way.

and it just so happens my vintage car stereo has a cassette tape player– so I’ve been listening to julia cameron during my drives to and from work– and in place of that too-frequent vortex spin of “what am I doing with my life? god, I hate this traffic/the cacophany of signage/the fleets of hermetically sealed strollers/other drivers/the rampant urban dinge”, have been submersing myself instead in sweetly spoken, at times sung, suggestions of hope and possibility. and I’ve picked back up the book itself and begun reading and doing it once again (this’ll be the third time through), beginning with Week 1.

Fibonacci_shell
Fibonacci_shell

Fibonaccispiral
Fibonaccispiral

and when I incline to self-flagellation over not being further along some self-realized and productive creative path, the artists’ way reminds me that the road of creative work is a spiral one– naturally so, like whorled seashells and fibonacci’s mystic sequence and musical octaves– and so I circle back over and again addressing familiar themes and slumps and challenges, and it’s all okay– as long as I am writing writing writing those pages every morning I am in motion, and motion is life.

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2:20 a.m.

blooms on the trees once more, and windows thrown open to the night. certain birds that sing through the middle dark. on the way home from work I’ve been driving with the windows full down, warm wind whipping a cyclone of trash around the interior, inventing madcap hairstyles I check out in the rearview. more days and more days and more. the river runs foul through the center of town, flushing itself of debris again and again, posted all along with signs warning hands off, but ducks don’t read. my pillow sucks dreams into oblivion. I sit awake beneath the ticking fan, listening to engines passing, people out late in the park, a lone bird chorusing, a sudden staccato drumbeat, then nothing.