taking tonight off - but writing on and on

The moon is full and the air outside is perfect. I'm not running because I exhausted myself yesterday; not sewing for the same reason. TonightI had a fruit smoothie ($4.40?!) and a conversation that didn't mean much , and I'm in one of those moods to write, and write grandly, but it all looks so feeble on paper, especially juxtaposed with the majesty and mystery of that narrative voice in my mind.

Words are the terribly plastic material... something something Carl Sandburg... of human existence? That might be it, but here they're the tragically myopic material of trying to invite someone into the fascinating, half-lit realms of another mind.

It's like Philip Pullman, when he narrates little Lyra, who knows that you can't look directly at a good idea or else its glimmering, Wizard of Oz-esque bubble will pop. Or Billy Collins, who devotes an entire poem to what happened when he shared a brainstorm and the poor unwritten bird of his poem flew out the bar door, never to be seen again. Wanting to say so much - and knowing I am unable to - reminds me of self-consciously realistic (or, sympathetically cynical) GK Chesteron: "In a word, God paints in many colors; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white. " [Italics mine.] So gaudily, yes - grandly, yes - and yet lyrical and powerful. How does he do that? Genius. The art of describing ideas, thought processes; the art of describing the abrasions of writing. Abrasions: self-adhered, or self-incurred?

All this to say that, on the bike ride home from the pseudo-meaningless fruit smoothie, I struck on a phrase, a small round stone of truth (Virginia Woolf? I think I have the noun wrong) which seemed perfectly and rotundly (is that a word?) fitting to convey my consciousness lately. But before I could look at it full-on, I looked away at an idea from earlier in the night, and got lost staring into a mirror that wouldn't let me go. My little stone was gone - forever, I thought - but suddenly returned, and its return got me thinking about all the phrases I want to write, the letters, etc... however, the gaudiness of tonight's internal attempts at grandeur scared me off, and here we are at the bottom of paragraph four. Congratulations if you've made it this far: few can bear another's thought processes this long.

And finally, that small stone, which will never read as clearly here as my mind sees it... I've been mad (crazy, not angry) these past weeks because my brain keeps poring over the loose ends (the twine and hemp frays I see are brown and broken) that I can't bear to leave untied, but lack the time to knot. And I don't like who I am, but I don't know how to be anyone else. Little wonder I am so discontent, often ambiguously angry. I am exhausted, and at my own hand, too. Regretful of the past; apathetic at the future; anxious in the present. Now I really am stuck in a moment. But it feels good to think all this through, for once, instead of nodding in passing.