Journeys and Star Gazing

I found some old notes written by hand—this one around 1979—and OCR scanned them. I revised and edited them, and here they are.

I have been sitting here for centuries, for months, for days, waiting. What am I waiting for, exactly? It’s a mystery that even I can’t unravel.

This blank piece of paper yawns at me again. Yes, yawning—not roaring or demanding—but simply sitting there, an expanse of white, opening its mouth to be force-fed words. But why force-feed it? Why sit here, pen in hand, scribbling down words that may or may not carry meaning?

Listen carefully. Read between the words, beneath them, through them, and beyond them. Somewhere within this ink, there is a reason, a lifeline that could pull me into a world where the ordinary becomes extraordinary, the mundane becomes miraculous. The world where one is equal to nothing, and nothing is equal to all. What? Am I trying to touch the portals of Heaven through this thin squirt of ink?

Listen again—is it not I who leaves the rind of the world behind? Is it not I who is lifted into the wild, illogical realm where reason twists like a pretzel and humanity shrinks to a slug? By excreting these lines (yes, excreting!), I have an activity fit for a lazy bum like me to call myself an artist, an author of the world. This is my voice, my essence, spilled onto the page.

It is as if a visitor sweeps away the remnants of me, picks up the pen, and records what he sees, feels, and tastes of this world through an eye that sees beyond the immediate, beyond the personal—the ‘cosmological eye,’ as Miller calls it. This act is like a cigarette slowly burning, like a caterpillar shedding its caterpillarness. Leaves fall from trees, and they realize they are always part of something more significant when they touch the ground. I want to understand what I am part of without leaving the tree—and the only way to glimpse that is to write myself into extinction so that the eye may peek through the smouldering ashes of these words.

And you know what? Just sitting here and rambling on is fun. But what is your aim? You might ask. Do I need one? What is your purpose? Do I need one? Few aims and purposes come with capital letters. Right now, I’m having fun, and that is all there is—pure, unadulterated fun.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 27th, 2024 at 10:26 pm and is filed under Creativity, fiction, personal, Uncategorized, writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.