A short freewrite: Self-Expression Free Write Session on a Thursday Night I feel like expressing something because I feel all sorts of things, not one thing, in particular. To feel is to hum gently with an electric light in the veins. I know enough to know that when you say one thing, you really mean its opposite, but possibly only in another realm. Other realms interest me, now, and how I both can access them and can’t. A professor once told me, “These days, I am only four people.” I said, “I’m two.” He said, “Only?” and smiled. *** An emerald moon in a soothing sky—that’s how it was, and how it was exists always, because it’s in my heart. Why would that city be in my heart? I am from there. *** It’s fun to be creative, as we all are, by nature. You can just run into the future with it—any word, any thread— as if the future were a path to a long jump, and after the long jump is taken, you’re on a different, better planet. You hurdled the abyss. See, it can all be awesome, we just have to make it like that. We just have to say yes to yes. And then what? Now, cascades of donuts and the thought that Bart Simpson is a thing of the past, in a way that the city with the doorways I hallucinated is not, sort of brings me down. I pass by a gleaming Dunkin’ Donuts in the subway station every day on my way to where I’m going, and the place symbolizes something to me about America, commerce, and caffeine, something I don’t really want to think about a lot. It has to do with death, too, how we try to overcome it, though I can’t really explain my train of thought here, so I won’t try, though it is tangentially related to an essay I wrote on shopping malls, about three years ago. Time is a bird flying by, all those TV episodes that will one day be reruns, or subjects of the phrase, “Did you see the one where…?” Mood stabilizers, oblong white pills, go down with a chaser of black coffee with sugar, now. See, I need that, too, that admixture of coffee and Divaloprex. I’m not ashamed to need these things. We all have our crutches. *** Words are crutches, too, but when we lean on them, they become birds that become fountains of youth, making us mean things, making us whole— then even better than whole. They make us into becoming. This is why I marvel at words. They are pure vehicle, pure motion, as in the motion between heaven and earth and the light that weaves and waves there— swirls, spins, cavorts, dives, blossoms. When I hear a word, sometimes I’ll just be at a café—I’ll just go nuts. It’s like, someone said something and isn’t that amazing? Some people would call me crazy, here, but I just can’t get over language. We, as a human race, took the grunts and ugs and thought them into patterns that can do more than grunts and ugs, so much more. I read Wittgenstein one winter—all season it snowed and I stayed in my room, listening to the harp player in the apartment above mine—and I read Wittgenstein—and I did not understand any of it, but still I knew how intelligent he was being. With the questions he asked, somewhere there had to be answers, though Wittgenstein himself often could not answer them. He just left the paragraph dangling into blank page, with a question mark looking really intelligent right there. I guess we were supposed to glean profundity from how complex—how many volumes—it would take for him to answer his own questions about, for example, how we know an apple is red, or how we equate a word, like “slab” to a thing, like a “slab.” What is a slab, anyway? I mean, I know what a slab is, sort of, but it just sounds funny to say, as if it’s a grunt, an ugh, and not a thing. Slab. It’s funny, the sound of that, right? I once had a theory that life was essentially hilarious. That can either be silly or profound, take your pick. Silly and profound, perhaps—that’s how I like to think of myself, a sort of trickster, tricking myself most of all, and leading people down a path into a silent room that is most themselves, then leaving them there, facing an abyss full of the stars in the night sky—that’s where it all leads to. Copyright 2012 by Jessica Harman
Posted on: Thu, 14 Nov 2013 23:03:44 +0000
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