.

It has been so long since I have just let words
flow untouched. Longer still since I have wanted
to show anyone my unedited thoughts. I am not sure
why. Perhaps I find something a little too mechanical
in the contrived click of computer keys, something
that the soft swish of pencil-on-paper more easily
inspires. The two effects coerce completely different
journeys, the last one most akin to standing inside
a gothic cathedral, god rising out of cold stone and
lifting upwards towards towering spires of off-rose
light. Weightless and paper thin. Surrounded by the
rude love of decorative accumulation. But unaffected
by it. Allthewhile asking what lies hidden beneath
its design. What methods of thinking transcend mere
technique, enough to reveal a greater inspiration?
Seeking flying buttresses of thought for colomnless
habits of mind that refuse to be trapped in the
sterile spaces of modern steelandglass; those cold
conventions where no attempt at soaring-upwards to
catch the speed of light can lift one past the pale
blue veil of heaven. Whereas here, in this ancestral
space of graphite on vellum with its silvery soft
sounds of nothing, I finally return to a writing
place where time is of no importance. And the
longer I remain, the less I know of this day,
this month, this year. Here, where I am finally
free to use language like a gothic stone mason,
like those geometrical elite constructing spired
ideas from their opposites, stone perfection
acheived by its weightlessness. So too, boundless
thought erupting from the gravity of tactile
materials. Their physicality. And while remembering
that none of the gothic cathedrals (like Chartres
and Reims) were built from drawings, I, too, move
away from the anaesthetization of this strobing
screen long enough to find simplicity on a wrinkled
page. There on that surface where words trail from
a tip and the tip from skin, there while asking how
to bend language like light upon its crease, I long
to fill it with its opposite, with silence. As if
to render it as rich and as complete as that. Or as
Deleuze would say, how to make language stutter.
Only then, will the whole of heaven be revealed in
its most musical scale with words that sing.

Occassionally, when people and things disappoint, I crave
a place that commands my entire attention, where the line
of flight moves me upwards past the thin veil of pale blue.
And while resting there in that silent centre of swirling
thought where nothing is desired, not the past, not words
and ego, but there, where restlessness ends and all hints
at imperfection offer the only possibile path to a perfect
fall, lies unthought thought. It floats on shadowy percepts
like unformed words on combustable change.

I spent the day watching strangers pass, reading faces as if to
find the paradisical on each one, as if to hear their best long
drawn-out nonsensical notes. Counting breathes while listening
to their silences as if this was the only thing left to trust.
This and the blue untroubled sky above.