Posts tagged epistolary
A State of Knowing
That’s all written in a state of wonder about the world. Yet, tomorrow I will wake up normally, eat breakfast like anyone else, grumble over my coffee, and retire upstairs to read for the few hours I have before I have to be at work. I’ll fly and hate myself for not being good enough, for never being good enough, because we’re never good enough, and I’ll release all that bodily stress through some borderline destructive workout that fills me with endorphins and light, and I’ll come home to wonder over some other book or some other sunset or bird-spotted or song heard on headphones that most couldn’t afford on a year’s salary, and I’ll see if I can come any closer to flipping a gear and getting past this state, to suddenly arriving at a knowing stained in a copper-colored confidence that shines in all forms of light and tells its story because that’s all it can do…”
…and the weird fever that runs behind our blogs.
Duckbeater
In correspondence to you all, to the surprisingly large number of attendees to my somewhat daily milieu, there is a tremendous amount unsaid on any given entry to the public. What is lost is sometimes found in the direct correspondence that we send one another, the purposively forced communication (sometimes easy, sometimes hard, but always a direct decision) that we send with intent for only one other set of eyes.
With this letter, I join the blogger-union and subscribe to their unwritten demands of a single, catchphrase, hook-line-and-sinker sentence as the second paragraph.
I often have so little to say because I find the exercise of relating trivial failings and upstarts as exactly that—trivial. What I don’t find trivial is the search for some meaning, some Reality beyond the primitive allowances of our own senses. We devour books like porn, sure that our obsession is in a greater realm than one of sensuality, and ask questions that have plagued all of humanity since the first moment that we realized we were going to die. We listen to music, searching for a trance that takes us beyond the basic moment of our lives and try to relegate meaning to the bass-line, the sudden kick of the guitar along the bridge. We move and we travel, scarring beaches with our footprints that we know will only too soon be erased and left for another to imagine that he is the first to walk where ancients walked, regardless of the imaginary time-gap that separates us from the Ancients to the Now. It’s all a fingernail shaving of a king dictating his measure of time.
I’m home alone for the first time this Christmas, and though I do not pity myself, I feel my pain in the ache of too-hard movements in the gym, in the grappling of meaning in the oblivion of pain. All thousand selves of mine that are catered toward cry out in unison of this solitude having meaning, even if they will later bicker whether that should come forthright with the night or after the sweaty embrace of so many anonymous faces in a crowd of others searching for something that I may or may not imagine.
With interiority comes acknowledgement of its existence in others, even the most simple of beings whom we come across in our global dealings. The bored face of my driver tomorrow in a foreign country will most likely be lost in the subdued song broadcasted on his favorite radio station, chords that are unfamiliar to my ears, but represent a home and love and dreams that I cannot begin to fathom. The letters this man may write may come with quotes from the Quran, so removed from common thought in its power that it arrives as a spell-checkable item in my own diatribe. And when we attempt to share this interiority, when we flounder at giving it words, there is so much we’d rather have understood unsaid than cheapened by being put to the verse and chorus of a language that in seldom shared.
The “weird fever that runs behind our blogs”? How about the one that drives at the marriage of sensuality with intellect, how about the one that searches for an early night in bed while facing a 4am phone call to tell him that work is about to begin, that his rooster has come in early this morning and crows just as shrilly? How about the trance of life, that sits in the moments that are bound to come, when I sit exhausted and spent in the back of a van that takes me in circles, driven by a man I will never know beyond his nodding head and his patience at watching me button up the tasks for the night in red, flaring seals?
This is the man that you follow—this is the fever that runs behind my words.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, in a letter to his daughter Scottie at college:
“Once one is caught up into the material world, not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life.
By this I mean the thing that lies behind all great careers, from Shakespeare’s to Abraham Lincoln’s, and as far back as there are books to read—the sense that life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat, and that the redeeming things are not “happiness and pleasure” but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle. Having learned this in theory from the lives and conclusions of great men, you can get a hell of a lot more enjoyment out of whatever bright things come your way.”
Correspondence
…I’ve never been the picnicking type, or one to find a shady tree to read a book for hours underneath, for when I’m outside I can only revert back to some misty childhood appetites that make me want to play. And all play is merely motion. One of the strongest memories of my childhood is my bike and riding it everywhere: the park, the creek, racing with friends along the streets and ramping up and down the curbs at what we certain were hellacious speeds; falling and scarring my body more times than I can remember. So, in my presumed adult years, when the summer comes, I find races and I begin training twice or three times a day. By the time the sun even suggests its thinking of setting my aching body is demanding that I move toward my bed, even as I keep demanding more of myself to read, to write, to keep learning and studying…that time is wasting.
The thoughts I’ve had about the battle between my body and mind are not original, but are certainly borderline obsessive. I want one to win out so I can perfect it. I refuse to forsake the gift of youth and give myself a moment’s rest…the beauty of youth is however cheap opportunity is, how easily we can move and experience the world, and one of my greatest fears is the day that I realize it isn’t because I’m not willing to move, it is because I can’t. And everything I do both with and beyond the body is to shore up for that moment, to have a reservoir of experience to remember fondly, to have a path lit just far enough ahead of me that I’m able to travel along alone, a mind thankful for all the gifts of its body…
Correspondence
…I must admit that I’m lost in all the work, in upgrade, in the massive spikes between “go, go, go!” and the sudden, slam-demands to relax; all the churning thoughts like eddies and currents we have yet to understand, much less navigate; all the countries, the people and their bespoke suits or rotting, stretched cotton given long ago by the land, the olive trees heavy with promise, the desert settled in its ancient memory; the thoughts I read in books from hundreds of years before, the politics of now and the sacrifice of the future for meretricious gains, three seconds of power, the ever-present understanding that I will not catch-up, that I cannot catch-up, that all efforts are in vain if I cannot learn to be content in the moment, whatever the moment is, whether we’re in Heraclitus’s river or if his student was right, that there is no “once” at all, that it’s all flux and motion and fluid that folds and merges and separates, yields and rushes, simultaneously, silently, infinitely. I just hope for the silt to settle, once a day, for a brief instant where the water is the air is the blood is the breath of life given to all the cells in our body inhaling together, where the senses are overwhelmed while we sit center, the pause before the crack and then, the return to the storm…
