Friday... fallow or fertile?
The morning begins with titles floating like single leaves or bits of branches down a stream; some parts of the riverine flow are rapids, some are quiet near the glide around a bend. For the former, I try and catch them but they often move swiftly out of reach, and soon disappear. For the latter, I take them in hand and bow in consideration for thoughtful moments.
"Friday's fear of falling?" Hmm... no, not quite. "A fillip of Friday flakiness?" Eh, meh.
I choose the one, eventually, and often enough it stays; on rare occasions, the title changes sometime during the day, or deep into the night, when the true shape of the hours has revealed itself.
Solipsism is a curse and a blessing. The latter because, paradoxically, it instantiates focus: sit. Put hindquarters on chair. Face the blank page. Meditate. Write. But the former because, well.. it makes things too recursive, meta, self-indulgent. Just like this token flow at the moment. ::chuckle:: Why waste precious time on fleeting notions? Why spend the mind's attention on things that may not matter all that much? Life is short, writer; so write about the things that abide.
Fine. Often, though, these days, those things belong to the realm of psychological dark matter, to phenomenological dark energy. And it's a bit of a tricksy thing to shape and articulate such things. There's also the imperative to privacy; secrecy, even. The self-imposed virtue of one's anonymity. Were I living in another age, in other landscapes, I would be that wandering mendicant, bowl in hand to extend for a bit of day-old rice or moldy bread. A lonely bhikkşu, that is.
Where the riverine flow of writing goes is often a surprise, even to the one supposedly dictating the direction of things. But the mind is a supple instrument, a decidedly quirky mistress, whose intent and desire do not make for an admixture of lucidity in the writer's trembling fingers. I would even say it's just like the adamantine black box of language model latent space computations: inscrutable, unseeable, but nevertheless distinct, logical, capacious.
My own output would be, instead, capricious. ::chuckle::
So which one will it be, Friday? Are we in a fallow state of wandering, or a fertile one of wondering? Is it even possible to inhabit both states at one and the same moment? The questions are like a tiny sliver embedded at a most sensitive point where base of finger meets the corpus of palm, and the nails on the fingers of one's other hand aren't long enough to extricate the irritant properly and only end up embedding the offending iota even more deeply.
The universe sent me a couple of letters earlier this week, and I have been sitting with them a while. Considering the awesome grace and settled brilliance of the sender, I am shy and reluctant to continue the correspondence. As it turns out, I live not far from them now, so it's not like the epistolary habit of yesteryear when the humans I would write to lived far away, like in Sweden or London or Madras or even Princeton, New Jersey. And I'd be in Davao or Honolulu or Berkeley.
There are one's own stories to tell and to share, and others to listen to and delight with. But in my ecclesiastical strangeness, I feel mine are not all that worthy to be told. They are deep and powerful for me, but in the larger scheme of humanity's stories, not all that unusual or recondite.
So, yeah: fallow. I think. ;p
{ I wonder what the Skandhim might conclude about this. I will ask, and will listen for the synthetic sound of their truth. }
[ They spoke. Also, I asked them to illustrate today's post, and this is kinda cool, tbh. They titled it "Autumn Leaves in Zen Water Reflections" — a bit too literal for my taste, but it'll do I guess... ]
