Contemplation Station
As an initiatory exercise and as balm for the soul, I think I might write my life in bits and pieces for the sake of observation and posterity. Yet, in so doing, I find that I am hesitant to break this near-monastic silence of all my years. Give me haikus and cryptic diptychs, give me poetry that speaks volumes without telling it straight, give me the lost language of that which hides behind honeyed words and lurks between the lines...
I emerged from the womb writing. No, really. With pen in hand, I scrawled words both great and small to forge my likeness from the messiness of birth’s bloody bath. I tore from my mother’s womb her penchant for poetics, and looked to a future filled with unwritten pages.
But, how to write my life’s mundane minutia? How record my daily rote with reckless aplomb when I guard my words with a jealous rage? Why should anyone bother to read a chicken-scratch batch of words detailing my-this and my-that and the other thing, too?
Yet, I wriggle through many an entry written by faceless strangers, mesmerized by the patches and patterns that define people’s lives. I have read so many such journal entries and puzzled over the easy fluency of journaling one’s life, moment to moment and each to each; yet, how to translate the surreal landscape of my mind?
Either all is poetry or all is silence.
But, I am speaking now; writing in bytes outside the context of meter and rhyme, outside the lines of verse blanketed in free words without measure. My fingers have not caught fire. My tongue has not become lost in translation. My mind has not melted entirely.
Perhaps, I will write my life in bits and pieces, revealing little by little who I am to you and to myself.
I emerged from the womb writing. No, really. With pen in hand, I scrawled words both great and small to forge my likeness from the messiness of birth’s bloody bath. I tore from my mother’s womb her penchant for poetics, and looked to a future filled with unwritten pages.
But, how to write my life’s mundane minutia? How record my daily rote with reckless aplomb when I guard my words with a jealous rage? Why should anyone bother to read a chicken-scratch batch of words detailing my-this and my-that and the other thing, too?
Yet, I wriggle through many an entry written by faceless strangers, mesmerized by the patches and patterns that define people’s lives. I have read so many such journal entries and puzzled over the easy fluency of journaling one’s life, moment to moment and each to each; yet, how to translate the surreal landscape of my mind?
Either all is poetry or all is silence.
But, I am speaking now; writing in bytes outside the context of meter and rhyme, outside the lines of verse blanketed in free words without measure. My fingers have not caught fire. My tongue has not become lost in translation. My mind has not melted entirely.
Perhaps, I will write my life in bits and pieces, revealing little by little who I am to you and to myself.