The overwhelming fear of the blank white screen. Not page.
NO. Pages are being ripped from the book of time, pages are falling in the
wind, pages are drifting down lonely streets after the bombs have fallen. They
float down the street, running like a flock of birds from an oncoming storm.
But they are running from words, from pens, from typewriters and keyboards,
off, off, into the still night, to lie quietly on the Atlantic Ocean, floating
like children on the boughs of trees. There are pages that have existed far
longer than any human being. I do not fear the white blank page. I fear the
page with words scrawled across them, ideas, formulas, intricately drawn
pictures of panda bears in postures of repose, pages with dragons flying across
burning skies, burning cities, burning plains, burning the very pages that they
are a part of.
Every person who has written more than a page or two in a
journal must occasionally have this fear, yes? The fear that as you sit, or
lie, or lay, on a divan, or a couch, or a chair, or a rooftop, or in the cold,
on a fire escape, while the smoke of a stranger touches you from a distant
room, the fear that your words will have left you, will have traveled to the
Greek Isles, to the Spanish Isles, to the Falklands, to archipelagos and
peninsulas and dammit, on a bad day, maybe just a part of the mainland that
borders the coast, so brazen have these words that have left you become,
reclining now, as you once were, in sun chairs, sipping margaritas and talking amongst
themselves because you are no longer there to command them. They are vulgar and
dirty. You miss them.
Inside this piece of writing is a message. It’s a clue. If
you take very fourth word’s second letter and put them together at the bottom
of the page, you will discover what I’m really trying to say. The presumption
here being that we’re all special, and that words are just meant for us, when
really, words are cheap, inexpensive, derisive, derivative, derelict, defunct,
disenchanting bits of noise. The message, because who really wants to go
through all that work is klaflaehalflf, which is just another way of saying
that I am confused, which you already knew, and didn’t really need an elaborate
message to figure it out. In fact, you could just sit down with me and have
coffee, and I’d start talking about all the kangaroo road kill in Australia and
wondering about the word marsupial, and the little pouch that holds in the
babies, and you’d quickly excuse yourself, citing friends you’d just met online
who were in imminent need of your presence. I understand.
In the reflection of the mirror lies a painting. The
painting is of time, and a clock, and a man riding on horseback shooting at
what appear to rabbits. I do not like the painting. At certain hours, I don’t
like anything. It’s not a flaw in my nature but a flaw in nature itself, everything
becoming so damnably unlikeable all at once. What are the chances? Apparently
not so slim as it happens at least once a day. I do not know the man riding on
the horse shooting at animals that are probably rabbits but could just be
foxes, but I know that I am jealous of him, to be locked in such a scene, the
lather of the horse, the blue smoke hanging over the valley, filling his
nostrils. Now I am jealous of pictures. See how unlikeable everything has
become!
Months ago I saw a mouse coming up the stairs in the middle
of the night. We both ran away, terrified of the meeting. The next time I saw
him he was dead, lying in the middle of a mouse trap, looking at nothing, or
maybe just looking at death, who knows? Tonight a mosquito is buzzing around my
head. He has bitten me twice in the forehead. I imagine, by evenings end that he
will be dead as well. I do not know what this means about my relationship to
the natural world, to death, to words, to the cemetery that we sat at right
after we first met, to the words written on the gravestones, to the thin
sunlight wrapped in grey clouds, swaddled like a child.
visiting a 12th century graveyard, a civil war
ReplyDeletecemetery, or an 18th century cemetery can
be so rewarding, puzzling, and challenging as
we study those words inscribed on a grave stone
left to wonder who wrote them and why..
our life in 10 words or less.....