Write til' you drop

A name can be an identity, or the barrier between you and one. Your name is the sohl-reason for your being. But it is not your being. It's a fly tied to the fishing line, and even forgetting, you've not lost everything. 
Sometimes, I think I enjoy sentences without knowing, or caring, how they connect. I often relish writing the words, feeling the taste and texture of them, with an appalling apathy with regards to overarching structure. I love words; I love sentences; sometimes I don't desire any greater tapestry than simply marveling at the few strands of thread I'm twirling in my fingers. 
http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/03/28/specials/dillard-drop.html
Annie Dillard has a remarkable essay on writing, and I've read it often to remind myself why I continue writing. I don't expect to sell my sanity and soul into this, but I do have some small passion for it. 
I often glance at my works and see only the skeleton of artistry, the meatless bones, and I wonder if I'll ever have time to clothe them. I've swirled up the dust of creation, but Adam looks like a halloween dry-bones or those crab shells left by sea gulls on the stones by the ocean. 
I jump from topic to topic, considering a new sentence that inspires me, even if its connection to the last is tenuous, or non-existent. I'm sewing non-sequiturs in patch after patch on a dirty rag, and hoping it will hold together if the patches are pretty enough. And the patches are beautiful, but the motif is all spontaneous confusion.

The River Why and Why

Ems asked me what my ideal schedule would be like, and I've been considering that, with regards to the coming month and time in general. In the book I'm currently reading, The River Why by David James Duncan (a re-read), Gus, the main character, moves out of home after high school into a cabin on the river and writes up "The Ideal Schedule" for his life. He even calls it that.

His ideal schedule is: fish for 16 hours, sleep for 6, eat and do what needs to be done in the extra time. After living thusly for a short while, he realizes how despondent he’s become – and why? Why is the question of the book. He realizes that his ideal schedule is lonely and purposeless.

One of the reasons I have difficulty articulating ideal schedules is that I tend to tackle personal obstacles as they arrive. I don’t consider myself a spontaneous person; it’s more like I plan to eradicate any despondency as it arrives, immediately, and then move on to what I want or need to get done. I also struggle with the concept of ideal. I’m not an idealist, and I think that my post on perfection explains a little of my confusion over what “perfection” even is. What is a perfect day? I have no idea, and no inclination to rigorously discover that quality. It’s too ephemeral.  I just live, love the best I can, work the best I can, and try to maintain a healthy, happy self when I’m melting in the crucible.

So I’m still trying to find balance between self and others in this newness of life. Mostly, self gets stuffed into an over-full closet of to-do, but that’s part of the discovery of the “other” the quality of loving and being loved in addition to understanding being an entity, of itself, in relationship. It’s a learning process, and I always feel way behind. I’ll need more journal time to find my soul.

Perfection

Therefore you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

there is none righteous, not even one;

there is none who understands,

there is none who seeks for god;

all have turned aside, together they have become useless;

there is none who does good -

for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God

for by grace… and not of yourselves…

Everyone who practices sin also practices lawlessness; and sin is lawlessness.

I think, growing up, I grappled with the idea of perfection all the time. I was, and am, something of a perfectionist when it comes to my being. If I sacrifice time and effort into an activity meaningful to me, I expect nothing short of excellence, of perfection. My competitive spirit always found comparison with those performing better, or those persons who were smarter, faster, stronger, more able.

Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

My perfection was an odd one. If an activity meant little to me, perfection was (is) unnecessary. With homework assignments, or games that I disliked, I rarely tried harder than what was necessary to do “well” or “above average”. But how does one spiritually acquire perfection? We’re constantly showing our efficiency at failure, myself in particular.

I remember once having an argument with myself about what perfection even meant. It means a life without sin, no? And sin means “falling short”, and its original use was in archery when the draw fell shy of the target. Sinning isn’t overshooting, or hitting the target and just failing to hit the bullseye – sinning is knowing that your arms simply aren’t broad enough to reach the target; the distance is behind your ken.

My argument was, could I simply lock myself into a room, and quarantine my iniquity from the world, and live a perfect life in seclusion? But I always came around to the idea that sin, and lack of perfection, wasn’t simply *not failing* but also striking the target. You cannot live perfectly by refusing to draw the bow in the first place.  “But I never even shot an arrow – how could I have fallen short?” It was an argument that always left me a bit miffed; a “damned if I do, damned if I don’t” sort of frustration. It was a catch-22 (thanks Heller), no doubt, and I felt the fall like a cancer within me.

Grace is a miracle. But it doesn’t make me perfect. I’m feeling particular imperfect lately, having been sick, and looking at my writing and wishing it better, and noticing all those places in my life where I feel like a spectacle of imperfection. We all are, perhaps, but that doesn’t relieve the feeling that we’re in glass houses, and everyone is witness to our weakness.

Finally Fever Free for Fall

This month has not been kind to me in terms of writing. That may seem sort of calm-before-the-storm, as next month will challenge my commitment and time constraints to their limits, but really there's no correlation. I got sick; I've been busy with plenty of people; la-ti-da. Not that my month has been poor; not by any stretch is this so (although, on second thought, the sickness hasn't been ideal). Mostly, life threw writing out the window, and in-flew-enza (okay, I didn't really get the flu - but the old joke poem opportunity was too convenient)
So Matthew asked today what my NaNo was even going to be about. Well... I have no clue. I had a stable beginning to a story, but nowhere for it to go. I've considered a couple of options thus far: make stuff up - I mean, this is what writing, and NaNo specifically, is all about anyway, right? Option #2: pick a story I've already invested more time into, and built a plot or setting on. The problem with this strategy is, I don't want to waste any good stories on the junk that will appear over this following month. Option #3: invest a day or two, sneaky-like, and really really prepare for this new story. Do I have time for this option? It goes well with option 1 if I fail to find the time. This is the most likely candidate at the moment. Option #4: take it a lot easier and hold less high standards. I've considered lowering the 50k lower limit on the story, and simply writing for the heck of it. Sure, it wouldn't be a novel perhaps, but a novella still fits the acronym fine, and I'd be doing the writing that I enjoy. I've also considered, as option #5: not doing nano. This option makes me sad. I could just read a book a day for 30 days, each of 50k words or more. I could write a poem each day for 30 days. I could try to learn something completely new, perhaps even something *ahem* novel, during the month of november, and simply use the month as a means of motivation.
But really, nothing entices me as much as the original intent of a completed novel. I'm going to have to figure this out.
In other news, I'm almost better! It's been about a week, so... about freaking time. The fall has been a little slow in coming, but the colors are filling up, and we're adding golds, browns, yellows, crimson, and scarlet colors to the countryside palette. I'm enjoying it, when I get out of bed and out of doors. Please send this cough and feverishness away for good.

Pacific Tree Octopus Me

Sometimes, I'm fairly certain my body dislikes me. I remember studying the immune system in late middle school, and thinking to myself: "wow, I'm invincible. My defenses are exacting and efficient with little superheroes patrolling the little roadways of my self."  This confidence lasted only a short while until we finished that chapter and began discussing pathophysiology. Then, I began thinking: "dear Lord, how am I still alive? My superheroes are more dated every season!"
So that's where I'm at right now.
I did not sleep last night - I have not slept well for several nights now. Yesterday, I read most of "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" and continued on "The Sparrow" between longer bouts of aimless computer browsing and lots of congested misery. I need some time to get NaNo sorted out, and I already expect this year's will be a disaster. But we'll see.
Right now, I feel ill. In my misery, I imagined I was a tree-stranded octopus. When the sun trickles between the branches, I'm scorched, and the breeze leaves me shivering. And everything, sun, rain, wind, leaves me high and dry and wondering just what happened to the sea. Or maybe I've had too many sleepless nights in a row.

Laconic Lunacy

Until you stand in a dark field, devoid of street lights and car eyes, of candle wicks tickling the night and fluorescence, on a midnight full of moon the field is a silver fox of rolling fur and its tails are the trees swaying in the twilight breeze - can you comprehend the being-divine? I hear no melodies, Lord, not one running through my mind tonight. I know they shiver and shift on the edges of my consciousness, but they've stagnated or silenced, like gnats in molasses - drowned, perhaps. An inelegance predominates, a hyperbolic nil, and I can't clear it out, for every other "it" is out, and this sticky residue, this vapid ectoplasm alone remains, home of fruit flies and ravens. A great Nothing populates this ghost town, with vacancy on every neon sign, dusty dens, and only tumbleweed duels at noon, though nothing moves, not even this moon as the sun since fled the sky.

vivisect to scrutinize,
I'm an insect on a slide -
careful with my psyche, loves,
where the spear enters my side
bleeds everything that's making me
alive? whispers the night
the bullet moon,
my bull's brown eyes
collide in a horoscope horror
blinding bright

Autumn Lethargy

The week begins and ends with an evanescence as shortly lived as morning mists, plaintive in passing; a nascent newness crescendos from silence. Just as things once soared towards sunlight, now petals seep, fall, and petioles close their little doors, and what was once tall huddles near the womb of earth and warmth. A patient subliminal mythos lingers, I suspect, brooding with the foreign fog that seeps over the ridge.

The haste of summer still simmers, and while the harlequin autumn stumbles its way in, its lethargy struggles to settle. The begrudging retreat of sunlight and conquistador clouds battle, and the brown grass greens once more, while mosses surge to life in gutters and corners. Only winter suffers no whimsy.

I’m too calculated, slow in discovering the progression of life. I want to allow the proofs, quantities, and sums to seep over me, slow as the waters grow cold and the leaves turn gold to die. I never loved the fast life, the hunger for now and instantly – it’s the patience of winter gnawing at the skeletons of trees and the flowers’ too-lipid realization that goodbye arrived without why and how, and the whale’s taciturn turning about south.

The hummingbird and butterfly are too busy for me. It’s the bumbling bear not the bee, I adore, the lumbering moose and not the chittering squirrel. All are welcome by the fireplace with me, sipping tea, cider, chai, and freeing world’s trapped in prisons of paper bound.