And maybe what makes me unhappy now is that I've grasped after that flow, paraded its disconnected elements, moments yanked out of their place in the midst of movement into a static and uncomfortable prominence. Maybe it is exactly the killing freeze-frame of reflection, interiority, counsciousness that makes me unhappy. Maybe by writing I stand too much in my own sunshine, blocking my own view.
If I'm to continue writing here, in some way that feeds the soul, is the secret to erase myself? Step aside. Or just ride and cut the commentary? I love, for example, the almost daily posts of Spirit Cloth, a textile artist - mostly visual, glancingly philosophical, focused on her work - with the merest self-referential asides. I love how what she sees shapes what she makes. What she sees is so blessedly outside herself.
I think it is my coiled upon coils of self-reference that I'm wanting to shed. The me in all this.
It has become almost a commonplace, this comment I keep getting -
. . . what you write is so sad. I never realized before you were so sad?
. . . couldn't help but keep reading, it just sucked me in . . . writing is almost haunting, and so full of emotion. Whoa.
. . . it is quite emotional.
. . . the emotions your writing unlocks in me. I've lived a lot of my life being so guarded and little by little I've been able to let go and just feel...although sometimes that's not so convenient - this ability to feel.
. . . Dude, lighten up.
But exhausting on the reader, yes?
Overconscious interiority, this emotionality ~ is that what I find irksome myself in these posts? The way my own sad-nosed shadow keeps overshadowing whatever I look at. The way working on these posts compels me to turn every rock over to see what squirmy thing is hiding on the underside. And how that squirming makes me feel.
But more irksome still is writing emptily, more lightly and brightly than humanly warranted. And more irksome than that is writing and writing and never getting anywhere new. Never getting beyond myself.
This is after all a vehicle, this Imaginary Bicycle, meant for going somewhere. But where?
And how?
Or is this just February and too many months of not long enough hours of sunshine? Sunshine? Haven't seen that since the chinook. I should say, not long enough hours of that skywide gray luminence we call Day here in this corner of the woods.
Enough perhaps to make anyone a little too interiorized.
5 you say?:
As another woman frequently baffled by others' responses to her expressions of 'emotions,' I shall chime in here simply to say that I think you write with honesty and empathy – generosity in the strongest sense.
I'm starting to learn what it means to allow myself to feel things strongly even when it might make someone else uncomfortable. This is not easy. But I think I might be beginning. Your writing is a powerful aid. Keep it up and quit it with the conditional tense. "If" you keep writing, indeed. I won't have that, miss, I just won't.
Me too. Sad, too, like you. People tell me. What's up with that? Just my life, the stories.
I've recently realized my closest friends and those to whom I am most often drawn are folks who seem to understand Story . . . "this unspoken depth" . . . They live in it. Observe it. Tell it.
They are truth-tellers. Straight up or slanted. Artists. Like it, admit it or not. And every artist reveals herself (like it, admit it, or not) in her work.
Lovely post. Thought provoking.
You have to know by now that I love your blog, your posts, your writings. I do understand, though, that you are not wanting the cycling to be merely a hamster's wheel, forever revolving without ever arriving. But at least the hamster is getting exercise, right?
Don't stop being you- the way you look at the world, wonder, turn things over and over and see the detail. I love that about you.
Post a Comment