I am wearing my bathrobe today. All day. Until I go to work. Or for a walk through the town to be braver about the weather than I am right now. Now I am safe and indoors with a lovely view of things from the distance of my father's desk.
My desk no longer offers such safety - it is covered with a letter half-created and three more to write today. I cannot say that they will be wonderful these letters, but I do not believe that they will suffer for it - rhythms are most often reached through repetition. It is the repetition's crash that I find difficult.
Any writer or artist will tell you this: the act of doing is indescribable. The act of having done is freefall and reaction. It sucks. The only way that I have ever found to keep some of that under control is to limit the amount of time I spend doing the words into some kind of order thing, or to limit the words, or to make certain that what is written is meaningless and disconnected. But these are all false and they do not work.
It is an act of bravery that will get me off my ass here and back on my ass in there, typewriter to hand, words in no pre-determined order put down on paper to be sent to unsuspecting friends and acquaintances. They are all of good humor. I hope.
I am reading The Geography of Strabo (in translation, of course) and am struck by something that is so terribly human and yet so terribly limiting. Strabo spends a good amount of time criticizing the words and works of others. There are various and valid reasons for this: to establish the correctness of the sources he uses; to define what are the limits of geography in terms of geometry, astronomy and physics; to define a vocabulary and expectation of word use; and to be kind of a jackass at people who he thinks are just wrong, and blind and make dangerous assumptions (cough cough).
At one point, he discusses a map that was drawn and became very popular and well read and he complains, rightly, that even though the map does not represent what is known of the known world at the time (even when it was drawn), and that many scholars and scientists recognized the problems with the map, it was not redrawn and the mistakes must be explained over and again because people used it, they believed it. It was written. If, as someone recently said to me, if we acknowledge that every writer is a product of time and place, then how much can I imagine it would take not only to publicize a map, to defend it and distribute it, but what would it take to do more than point and scoff at its mistakes. To make an argument of a conversation, to willingly engage with another person's intellect, ability and experience in order to alter a thing which has been made almost concrete; these are acts of confidence and openness that always astonish me.
It is one thing to blather on a will. I do that all the time. Even in my brain, when I'm not talking to anyone or writing anything, there is blather. Really. It doesn't ever actually stop. But rarely is it well-thought out and even more rarely am I prepared to brook dissent and argument. (Granted, most of the arguments that have been leveled at me are of a personal nature and do not much more than convince me that most people are not as willing to see things from different perspectives as I generally find desirable (really).(in other words, we don't hang out.))
Most of my relationships involve a certain degree of distance. Usually that distance is intellectual or emotional. Now that it is physical and not likely to become less as time goes on, but more, I find that there is a need for courage.
The sky glows light gray in front of the afternoon sun. I've boxes to move yet and letters to ponder. This evening I will take a long way to work.
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