The train speaks only as a warning to we feeble and forgetting, for it knows we slip any schedule or even with memory disbelieve that so many tons of steel will enter our lives so soon to leave as quickly. From where you are do you hear trains louder in nearness? or quieter in closeness? Will that orientation be packed with your other things for the move? Imagine if each car had such need and means to greet, instead of their silent self-conscious roll badged like death's deputies pacing duel lines in the middle of each street.
How language can creep up on one invisible except to memory's comparisons like a fog that you don't notice entering until suddenly you're in the thick of it. Many things seem so both good and bad, vapourous joys and defeats we wander through to horns and lights and internal maps; perhaps here willpower as you said might be our lantern, put power in decision, force direction to let living prove the right of theory. Oh but it is a difficult time to sculpture so our minds! I reach to blame postmodernism but perhaps unfairly, it may be only indolence or bustle.
And even if we cannot write through it let us write at least into presence, outside ourselves and reaching to be unafraid of existence, outside ourselves in essential unnecessary ways, circling conspiracy. If ideas are just a mist of life's material breath, let us exhale hotly into a cold world and see ourselves thereby, a rather Boston sentiment but I trust it is received.
A little more of the life consisted of having to figure out how to live than had been expected when fourteen and sixteen were wrought. A little more of life has consisted of discarding fits than could have been expected! But there is much more than a little more to life than I'd expected, though it gets harder to hold on to this the further I get from childhood. But how for you, these skins and sheddings, slitherings and layerings, laminations that refract reflection, how do they sit withon and withoff?
I keep typing "set" instead of "sit" and there's a voice just in that; they mean together on pedestals and jello molds, but apart in contemplation or collection. The sitter is the setter of the dashboard, but to set and sit are opposite aspects of their surf, intersticed like sounds of hooves; sitset sitset sitset. I'm stealing valor here, I write these sentences laying down, to sit is strange to me, to set familiar, no doubt it's a spectrum; what spectres flit about you bringing cheers and those gradients of air we call a breeze?
And so we sitstalk setting into time, gelatinous yet somehow boned, blood rushing but we turn it always to stay beneath the surface in the danse of life beneath the beautiful sleek roughness of the planets and other magnets and the light they bend the ears of in affection of its travel; we must imagine comets the beloved niblings of the planets, passed around for games and kisses neath exclamations of the dear dimpling of their cheeky frozen waters, their darling tails, the warmth and grace they bring to space.
I hear the trains too, though from a distance that makes them seem eavesdropped on or presented as nostalgia, and so I heard when figuring how to start writing you, it gave me impetus. I love that you cherish the frustration they bring, and I'm sure your cat does too; trash but maybe also presence, things ancillary to the thrust of will but essential to being. Like perhaps these inessential letters, which don't get "Aim"s but are content with "Be"s; my struggle is to let the loops suggest themselves, hence the delight of writing in response to past or present conversations with you, between we and conductors.
No, what scares me into visualizing my escape route is the Wednesday noon tsunami warning tests; I see highways and alternative routes to farms I know and imagine myself useful on, to places I could forget the world from, ironic for a practice so demonstrative of memory to enshrine forgetting so. But if you want to toss our worries on the pyre I do have things to burn, a sweater from my old job that giving away feels insufficient for; I joked on leaving that I'd vest my stock options just to burn them, though ultimately it was easier to pretend to forget them, to crouch down from the overhead schedules of the jetset as I used to as a child; what routes were those, I wonder, that passed so near my valley? Long routes I'd expect to go by sea so perhaps just local planes but they looked like 747s to me. Do you remember planes overhead?
But at my back and all the time I hear the material world drawing near; I accepted or decided at some point it wasn't possible for me to not get downed by the background suffering, but that it felt better to wade into it. Perhaps this is why I neglect the readings, afraid of more awareness. As it sounds like your protagonist is, or you tire of in him, the involution and never-falling spiral afraid of outward act or rupt. But would you feel fear too to write him bold? Or do you feel you might be tangled in the time you're trying to break if he acts unthinkingly?
Respondently yours,
Ned