the past is what shines through white, blinding and empty
I wasn't going to write this evening, but I find myself translating myself, again, here, now: the nebulous images and emotions of my mind rising through the patterns of my ticking fingers. My memories and reason marking time, so to speak.
But this process of writing is an amazing distance from the process that takes place with pen or pencil and paper: sometimes, on the computer, entire sentences must take shape before my fingers begin their spasms across the keys, unlike when I have pen in hand and progress across the page pedantically. The physical translation (carrying across) through the different movements of the hands for the different methods of recording must have subtle, seismic effects within the brain, on the chemical and neurological processes that govern it, too, I would think. But it does not matter if I write on paper or on the computer, I self-edit too quickly, correcting my text immediately, amending spelling flaws and grammatical errors, substituting more apt phraseology for a group of words that could have limped along on its own just fine. There is little opportunity for me to produce a consistent flow of language. Even all my ellipses (that means these: "...") must be purposeful and fulfill the emotional tenor of the subject; they can't be appended haphazardly to the end (or middle) of a lazy statement. Perhaps this is the mark of a careful writer, a self-conscious thinker... or maybe just a linguistic tight-ass. (How was that for emotional tenor?)
Anyway, once transposed from thought to page/screen, the effects of the text on the psychology of the writer are immensely different, as well. Typed text elicits radically contradictory responses from me: I am simultaneously drawn to its seemingly polished, publishable appearance, as well as nervous and superstitious around my keyboard: it can all be washed white so quickly; one click, a key stroke: deleted: neverwas.
This concept of "neverwas" is far more engaging than a pseudo cog-sci investigation into the psychological effects of typing your shit out onto a computer, and so I'll pursue that (already I'm writing for an audience; or, to correct myself: still). Daily, we attempt to wrarp this language around our experiences and it falls off like an elephant's tutu from the hips of the tall man (I don't know where the circus simile came from). Sometimes a word snags and hesitates for a moment, catching on a shard of experience and the experience seems to give that word its appropriate form, its content, but inevitably, unless all the other coupling words hang equally, the whole sentence slides to the floor, and then, why not? Why not assume that everything that doesn't stand in its shroud of interpretive language, its wardrobe of translation, neverwas? That the past is what shines through our ineffective attempts at communication: white, blinding and empty. This idea of neverwas seems also much more direct than the use of the term "nothing" to describe an awareness of absence.
Today, Jay and I were on our way south to Oakridge, along Hwy. 58 to go riding and we passed the most immaculate scene: down a short, steep embankment, at the edge of an iridescent meadow lay a huge, white and black bull. It was massive; in death the length and girth of the animal was easily apparent, the weight of the animal was palpable in how it burdened the earth beneath it: the grasses around it seemed to bend down toward it, as water flows to the low points of the earth. The farmer stood beside it, appearing contemplative from the back, head in hand. At that moment, the butcher stepped from his refrigerated van and began his heavy walk toward the man and the bull. The butcher's smock was slightly yellow in the gray of the rain, and it parted twice: on either side of the two corsetting buttons above and below his belt. The butcher was a stereotype stomping through the world: an eight-ball of a man, his jowls extending into his shoulders, his shoulders descending into his chest, his chest drowning in his rising stomach. The butcher came forward with an impressive sense of inevitability; his hands swinging at his sides were hammers. He breathed heavily, the vapor coming from his mouth into the cold world in clouds. And then we were past the scene, our eyes wrapped in the fog lifting from the moss-softened limbs of the firs, the rain rebounding from the asphalt like jacks.
Easily, innocently, we could have missed that portentous moment when the butcher stepped from the van for his confrontation with the dead bull. A moment longer at the gas station, a minute faster on my way out the door. But for our synchronicity with the bull's life ending; the butcher's slow morning of bacon and coffee, his dour reception of the farmer's phone call from behind his sopping block, taking his time in the wiping those hands; the farmer's insistence and impatience, voice pleading into the yellow mouthpiece of the kitchen phone to salvage the meat, we would have missed that particular reality. And it, too, would belong to the realm of neverwas, that luminous fog of pre-possibility.
In fact, that scene in its completeness does belong in the realm of neverwas: I'm sure that as the butcher stepped down from his gleaming van, grimacing at the softness of the soil beneath his shoes, feeling himself sinking in a little, a magpie twittered in the oak that overhung the bull. And I can't sing like that.
But this process of writing is an amazing distance from the process that takes place with pen or pencil and paper: sometimes, on the computer, entire sentences must take shape before my fingers begin their spasms across the keys, unlike when I have pen in hand and progress across the page pedantically. The physical translation (carrying across) through the different movements of the hands for the different methods of recording must have subtle, seismic effects within the brain, on the chemical and neurological processes that govern it, too, I would think. But it does not matter if I write on paper or on the computer, I self-edit too quickly, correcting my text immediately, amending spelling flaws and grammatical errors, substituting more apt phraseology for a group of words that could have limped along on its own just fine. There is little opportunity for me to produce a consistent flow of language. Even all my ellipses (that means these: "...") must be purposeful and fulfill the emotional tenor of the subject; they can't be appended haphazardly to the end (or middle) of a lazy statement. Perhaps this is the mark of a careful writer, a self-conscious thinker... or maybe just a linguistic tight-ass. (How was that for emotional tenor?)
Anyway, once transposed from thought to page/screen, the effects of the text on the psychology of the writer are immensely different, as well. Typed text elicits radically contradictory responses from me: I am simultaneously drawn to its seemingly polished, publishable appearance, as well as nervous and superstitious around my keyboard: it can all be washed white so quickly; one click, a key stroke: deleted: neverwas.
This concept of "neverwas" is far more engaging than a pseudo cog-sci investigation into the psychological effects of typing your shit out onto a computer, and so I'll pursue that (already I'm writing for an audience; or, to correct myself: still). Daily, we attempt to wrarp this language around our experiences and it falls off like an elephant's tutu from the hips of the tall man (I don't know where the circus simile came from). Sometimes a word snags and hesitates for a moment, catching on a shard of experience and the experience seems to give that word its appropriate form, its content, but inevitably, unless all the other coupling words hang equally, the whole sentence slides to the floor, and then, why not? Why not assume that everything that doesn't stand in its shroud of interpretive language, its wardrobe of translation, neverwas? That the past is what shines through our ineffective attempts at communication: white, blinding and empty. This idea of neverwas seems also much more direct than the use of the term "nothing" to describe an awareness of absence.
Today, Jay and I were on our way south to Oakridge, along Hwy. 58 to go riding and we passed the most immaculate scene: down a short, steep embankment, at the edge of an iridescent meadow lay a huge, white and black bull. It was massive; in death the length and girth of the animal was easily apparent, the weight of the animal was palpable in how it burdened the earth beneath it: the grasses around it seemed to bend down toward it, as water flows to the low points of the earth. The farmer stood beside it, appearing contemplative from the back, head in hand. At that moment, the butcher stepped from his refrigerated van and began his heavy walk toward the man and the bull. The butcher's smock was slightly yellow in the gray of the rain, and it parted twice: on either side of the two corsetting buttons above and below his belt. The butcher was a stereotype stomping through the world: an eight-ball of a man, his jowls extending into his shoulders, his shoulders descending into his chest, his chest drowning in his rising stomach. The butcher came forward with an impressive sense of inevitability; his hands swinging at his sides were hammers. He breathed heavily, the vapor coming from his mouth into the cold world in clouds. And then we were past the scene, our eyes wrapped in the fog lifting from the moss-softened limbs of the firs, the rain rebounding from the asphalt like jacks.
Easily, innocently, we could have missed that portentous moment when the butcher stepped from the van for his confrontation with the dead bull. A moment longer at the gas station, a minute faster on my way out the door. But for our synchronicity with the bull's life ending; the butcher's slow morning of bacon and coffee, his dour reception of the farmer's phone call from behind his sopping block, taking his time in the wiping those hands; the farmer's insistence and impatience, voice pleading into the yellow mouthpiece of the kitchen phone to salvage the meat, we would have missed that particular reality. And it, too, would belong to the realm of neverwas, that luminous fog of pre-possibility.
In fact, that scene in its completeness does belong in the realm of neverwas: I'm sure that as the butcher stepped down from his gleaming van, grimacing at the softness of the soil beneath his shoes, feeling himself sinking in a little, a magpie twittered in the oak that overhung the bull. And I can't sing like that.
posted by a. frost at 12:31 AM
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