Certain languorous afternoons can seem as if they last an
eternity. It seems as though all of your conversations are fragments, pieces of
an incomplete puzzle. If I say to someone that my plant does not look well, I’m
not even sure if the plant doesn’t look well, or if it looks reasonably well
given the circumstances, or whether it is dead, or whether I mean that it lacks
sunlight or water, when what I really mean to say is that the plant lacks a
certain will to live, that the water and the lights are fine, but it feels
strange to tell someone that you blame it on the plant. I’ve been told that
only human beings take their own life, but you haven’t seen this plant.
This is not what I meant to say. I meant for this to be
about continuity, linearity and change. I meant to tell you about the third
side of an isosceles triangle, how beautiful it is that we know that third
side. What strange two words those are, to know. What could they possibly mean?
That isn’t what I meant to write either. It is as though I
spend my days sitting down to a painting, splashing shades of purple in a
corner, as if drawing a sunset or a sunrise, or hills in the distance, but I
can never quite tell what I intended, because I have moved on so quickly to the
next easel, where my colors have been arrayed for a moment. I’m speaking of
stillness.
I am restless by nature, given to fits of intense thinking
that leave me wandering through the afternoon light, feeling as if I’m floating
past a sea of faces. And I can’t help but think how strange is that there is so
much distance between us, these people and I. When I’m writing fiction, my
characters are always troubled by all the untold stories of that sea of faces.
In life, I realize, I am troubled more by the fact that they don’t know me.
This is a gross sort of thought, not surprising, given our own cultural
obsession with fame.
I don’t mean to confuse things though I am often confused,
which makes it difficult to avoid. I think, or think I think, the construction
of thought sometimes confuse me. Like, I can’t think “bee buzzle diggle”
because it is nonsense. When I think bee, I think of its slight hum, and a
screen porch that it bangs into listlessly, or one of those slow motion camera
shots that captures a bee, strangely arachnid looking in close angles, pollinating
a flower. What I meant to say is that I want to be known, though this is a kind
of impossibility as I always seem on the verge of change, and what I want on a
Tuesday morning at nine may not be what I want on Saturday at 3.
Most of this is silly. I meant for this to be an essay about distraction, about the need for
stillness. I’m not a curmudgeon. In fact, I’m an adherent, but as I walked
around in the warm air I was jealous of the people sitting on benches, or stone
steps, talking with one another in postures suggestive of long and attentive
listening. I imagined a bottle of wine to improve the scene, but I left everything
else in place, the sun lazy on the steps, trees bending slightly in the slight
breeze. Tomorrow morning I’m going to rise early. I’ll wake before everyone and
devote myself to silence. But you see, I am so tired that I’ll probably sleep
til noon.
But you ARE a curmudgeon, and you revel in it. Distraction is always there, like an invisible hand closing on us as we blink.
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