ain’t that the truth

Writing: Words and concepts take on a crystalline assembly-line structure. There is–like visual perception–a very clear, high-resolution central phrase: that is what i am thinking aloud Right Now. The words i am currently writing. Along with this there is a peripheral awareness of where i have been and where i am going: words fading to a murky black on either side of the spotlight of my pen. There is a background that for the sake of the metaphor i should call a factory but that is visually and sensually much more like a slowly swirling marsh floor. Dozens of grey swirling vortices on a background of black grass and black water. For a sense of scale imagine patches of swamp grass and then imagine the almost-whirlpools to have diameters of about one meter and scattered haphazardly. The words, black crystal, always rise from the center of these vortices, but only when i am thinking about what i am trying to say, never while i am saying: then it is only the spotlight and the phrases in train fading into and out of focus.

Talking: This is like dropping down into a, the, vortex. The phraseology of my thoughts spinning around me fast enough to feel, far too fast to be able to picture or even really conceptualize. In this, words are debris that come from coalescing knots of vespertine thought. Focusing on a thought increases the wind-speed and so the rate at which the wind tangles up in itself to produce words. And along with focus the words of others are chaos variables, like fans blowing in a hurricane. More accurately like the hand of a capricious god in a hurricane: changing wind speed and patterns, creating eddies and gusts, and occasionally changing the whole nature of the storm– a hurricane becomes a tornado, say, or perhaps a light rain on a moonlit lake.

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