Wednesday, August 06, 2008

It's A Wonder We Can Even Feed Ourselves



There is a blank page and it is staring at me expectantly. It is rather difficult to find words when there is no one to look at them and respond to them and tell you how they feel about them. There was a time once when someone did that, when someone stared back with knowledge of words and writers and I suppose at the time he never really did say anything that brilliant. I suppose, if I really think about it objectively and not forgivingly and with pity and regret, that he rarely was able to say anything very distinctly, very definitively. And I made him purposefully into a hollow shell, a hidden ghost but then, suddenly, unexpectantly, he became a mocking, vibrant reality and he was there infront of me and I ran, afraid of crying, into the darkness. I returned and there was an empty chair to look back at me and instantly I regretted running. Instantly, I regretted pretending to smile, trying to smile despite such fear of a flood of feverish sobs. Perhaps it was my own lack from the beginning. Perhaps I expect so much of people and then they are afraid because they don't think they can live up to my expectations. But, maybe I set the same expectations for myself and that is why I think it is simple for other people to achieve them. I try so hard to write and to grow in writing that it was so foreign to me that someone who was as talented as he was could just be so lazy about it and never really finish anything. And I thought that I might help him, that I might give him feedback which was engaging and real and it would inspire him to write and to finish things. But, I painted myself into a corner and I lost the only person who ever understood how I feel about words. Though, I say that I lost him, it seems almost that I never really had him and I poured myself into the situation so openly and so honestly and so beautifully (until the end, when I got drunk and ugly) and that he never did once react the way that I wished he would. And I never did understand what he wanted from me.

Sunday, August 03, 2008

The Storms Of Time's Swords. Letter 4.


These letters are responses to letters published on The Exquisite Thread (the link can be found to the right). In case you were wondering.

Dear______,

It is rare to find a heart filled with want, insular and hollow and yet still beating so steadily, so passionately. You make such grave and solemn claims, to forsake that with which you feel, touch and see, and yet there is a deep irony which lives within the weight of your emotions and which betrays the very words with which you claim this darkness. Perhaps you fade into the muddy depths of dumb dreams but those are not the dreams of an unborn child; they are the dreams of someone lost in life, afraid to accept the burden of the gift he has been given but which is so hard to give back.

The proof that we are alive lies in everything around us and in our ability to perceive it and to make it something new, something with our own reflection glancing back at us, hidden just beneath the surface of the universal. My heart beats irradiatively, flecks of lambent light aflame inside my chest. I try to fill the swelling space which you so definitively describe with the beauty of words and sounds and sights. When I stare into a sky alight with the summer sun and awash with the billowing clouds, I find that there is little need to peer over into the space within a space at the center of all things. And even when I am overcome with the immeasurable depravity of the human condition, I never find other people arbitrary. It is when I am mired most deep in disgust for the sins of the individual that I look to others for solace. I look to others but I also look inside myself.

I live in the hope that our words will one day sustain someone the same way that Shelley's and Shakespeare's words have sustained me and you too, my dear. Your words also sustain me and each time we finish fleshing out these thoughts and making them words, I breath a heavy sigh of relief that something was expressed and understood and will be remembered. I am happy to be a bastion, a citadel to hold strong against the storms of time's swords. What better use of these words than to cushion the beams in the walls of one's heart. For that is surely what your words do for me; it is what the best words achieve. I will use your words to remind me that I am not the only one who seeks to say things long since left unheard, that you too absorb and reform the world's words and make them your own.

These letters, though beautiful, do conceal a certain simplicity. The ease with which we've been able to leap into these letters after such a long silence is, I think, not quite clear. There is so much detailed inward focus and so little of the drab and daily. Tell me what you do when you are not writing me lenghty, lovely letters. Tell me how you came to write me again after so many voiceless years. Disclose some lost, hidden secret and I will as well.

Unveiled,
_________________