I woke this night after an extended sauna with dear buds skin soft and jaw over-relaxed and an itch to write some overcomplicated sentences and delighted as ever that you'll indulge me in them. There's just something about this feeling of speaking oneself into being in a letter, expressing against the right amount of resistance to push harder, and I can imagine this feeling in weightlifting, that vulnerable sport of accounting; do you encounter your lifting as something with the right wind to run into? or how in cycling one makes one's own wind as a most elaborate fan, spinning the whole world with each push of leaping feet.
As this reference frame tango might suggest I've fallen into special relativity lessons online, far from the only thing these days that reminds me of the end of highschool, the start of college. I'm out here feeling like a teen, sullen cargo constantly strewn by waves into the hungry sea in historically accurate overwhelm. There's something so beautiful in the excitement of a good physics teacher or student wrestling a hidden world into view, kicking stones down the street pondering how we all move at the speed of light in various combinations of space and time. I miss it and wonder too that I locked myself away; there were too many things to take in, to earnestly perceive, in undergrad I was a mystic looking to part the veil of the world with a mathematized new magnifying glass, but I started finding always in the details of causality the trace of human pain, and eventually the same stubborn insistence on trying to understand which got me into engineering awe saw me out. But I miss it so; I don't really know what to do with parts of this puzzle-box brain without a joyous external universe to point at in curly scripted depth.
It's been a time to feel these months past, too much too unready or too close to fit in luxuriating sentences which glance and tangent, langorous cathode rays too shy to entangle a blushing phosphor. Over the phone sometime! and slash or do write me back whatever comes to mind from atop your snowy apple.
I am up early, and evidently to write long and lovely sentences, or at least loving, exhalations to match the careful breathes I've taken recently like cool sips of air, trying to bring an appreciation for the flavors of water to the flavors of air, the way a little liquid brings awareness to all it touches, lips mouth throat stomach and a night's errant chin drip, inspiration for respiration. O what fluids make of us, we bones in seas of pudding, skeletons with the desperation which accords rigidity or any stiffness admitting the leverage that permits comparison.
I hope my humble pirouetting missive finds you star stuff with an internal cage, contacts in some way stressless, a gentle alien sun the light caresses.
I awake to find my jaw had relaxed in the night to a position no longer comfortable, skin pulled after long sauna to soft relaxation, the way kneading bothers a dough softer and readier to stretch, how too points of pressure melt muscle to meet bone. In all this year's feelings I've been learning too much about the weathers of the body, as a weary wanderer exhausted by rains sleeps too soundly through the sun or a priest in desperation grasps at last what faith was. Such muchness is, though it feels madness to open up in such a time, better surely to let clog our rain spouts and soak in the weight of the world than letting it flow through.
But yet this letter, in awareness of our moon and tides, and which I hope finds you estuarily, letting weather flow down and through to accompany that mossy beauty which breathes eternity.
Exercising words like in that poem years ago collecting thanks I find myself now an octopus of missives that lounge swim or slide like a snake shedding sibilants of skin to swaying strands, silver grass turnt gold as the moon hands off to the sun and ticks another day. There's just something in description, isn't there? The hubris of it, to think we could catch a feeling how a spider might a fly or a tree sun's sugar and feed it to another. Maybe this is what LeGuin means by literature as a fruit of life "like carrying a basket of bread and smelling it and eating as you go," a waft calling memory or building imagination from it, how nonsense is built with concrete senses or it could never tower so, and we hide in the confusions of fiction from those of reality, so too for certainties. What do you make of art? is there a way you dream into it? would you write, paint, animate, spice?
I watched about the tiny indonesian island that held the secret of nutmeg, the many ways of a fruit I knew only dried (it's juiced??), the subtle arts of unknown nuts, the language holding its names from another island, just before you mentioned you were there in distant familiarity; what place, what archipelance. where do you feel of? What a strange organ must receive ofness.
Transmissively yours,
Ned