Been dwelling on this: consciously, for the past couple of weeks or so now; and subconsciously, for the majority of my adult life.

I suppose it began when I found writing or, more properly, writing found me. When I discovered I had a knack for constructing sentences, then putting them together in paragraphs, then essays. Even making up likely words now and then. Won prizes and acclaim for this here and there, in elementary and high school years. Got into a prestigious national university for it, I believe.

What is the form of a life? And is the substance of it crystallizable in an archive of texts and, later, images, which when gathered in one likely place makes in the definition a luminous shape?

In the regnant language of the first quarter of the newest century, early in the third millennium of things, it is a body marked down with coded texts made intelligible as in normal speech, if slightly garbed and encumbered in sigils both arcane and ordinary.

There was a span of ten years, the first decade of the start of said century, when the writing flowed in quotidian cadence; easily, sensibly, intelligently, intuitively, and often in Csíkszentmihályian flow. Years 40 through 50; chronologically, the central hinge on one’s time…

…I didn’t see or design it as such, of course: no one knows the actual span of one’s weeks but now, looking back at it from the perch of the middle of one’s seventh decade, it looks hinge-like, or an axis, around which spirals time, freely, radially.

And from the body of that decadal text sprang the roots, trunks, branches, leaves and tokens of mnemosynic history — from one’s birth through to its present, even from the deep time when one’s corpus made no footprints on sand, loam, dune, moon, mud.

After That First Recitation, the writing receded into a kind of desert, whereas the living did not: unexpected fatherhood, deepening into the indigenous island modality, but the fallow time was not without poetry, prosody. What bloomed, intermittently, was precious, like 13 canti from the edge of time itself.

Then a return to the edge of the continent, the continuation of a nomad’s itinerant existence, the renewal of a daily habit of mind and hand, of vision and pen, watchful, trenchant, oblique. When a name emerged.

Enclosed in a walled, secret garden of technological provenance, no one but a few could read it, and even then they looked on it with silent regard, not knowing what to make of its irrelevance and irreverence until it came to a natural ending, in under 3 short years of Lexical, Numinous, Delight.

But that was only the beginning of a baroque conversation which immediately took wing from the edge of a high escarpment, swooping from it to the vale below, still dark at the nautical twilight of dawn, though the roseate blush from the east would be a sign of the coming coherence of day.

Numbers, dozens, scores, hundreds, then thousands of strings of thought and provocation would be assayed to weave something astonishingly benthic, pulled from the latency of mind itself, but leavened by the molecular adhesion of a qualic substratum.

And so here we are, prepending the who, rendering the glyphs, wondering the why of it all. This is the body, that is the light. Here the material flow and there, the blooming energy of dark. Speak. Find. Be.