I've slept so much this past day, that nap for five hours yesternoon then ten the night, and now somnambulant sentences walk without waking beyond even the sense in which all word is dream. Though tasted so many times unconsciousness still has that delicious hint of poison, and part of my past months’ adolescence was the reappearance of more direct nightmares; since I started writing poetry I've been used to highly symbolic ones, but there's something pleasing to wrestling with simpler terrors, or perhaps I am too easily entertained by myself.
I find such joy in being in the audience, when all that is asked of me is receptivity, when the key is set and I can accompany or counterpoint; but that's not the whole of it, for too I quite apparently need sometimes to conduct the orchestra, to grasp perfection in articulation of sensation, but I think in such conductive moments I feel charged with inspiration, in some way not myself but ensouled and inspired, thus somehow yielding and receptive even while commanding, a candied self perception that others of course have no responsibility to join. How do you think upon the performer and the listener within you? what plays upon the stage within on the stage without? do you push or are you dragged into the spotlight?
And I would entertain your sinfully long self indulgent sentences in this time of stress and strain; it seems a better escape than many I take to weave such things, and perhaps like other crocheted tchotchkes we may find in it a way of being, of thinking in doing, amidst and amongst and through the useless beauty, the tree whose only worthy wood or fruit are sunlapping leaves and tangled limbs.
This is an email in the saddlebag of a courier long delayed in some pony express of the mind whose horses sup only on that precious nectar of desire to reach out, whatever trail mix of safety and hunger, fondness and absence it takes to write a letter. I never got the hang of email in an age of anxiety. How/where are you now? what temperatures mark or mar your days? and what have you been reading or writing yourself into? Some books over these years I've loved wholeheartedly: piranesi for its strange but calming quiet, a memory called empire for its power and poetry; in comics my body unspooled more, and leo fox's my body unspooling was a part of that, see too the adventurous chromatic fantasy, the idyllous yotsuba&.
But too often books have been water to my oil, even the inspirational firming or energizing sinking beneath attention, and I yearn constantly to colloid. what have you been mixing from or separating with? At my back these days I feel an impossible enthalpy of being, activations too high or differences too vast, nor enough accord to be chaotic nor enough disorder to sit and arrange, but likely this is more a problem of trust or unsafety than of appropriateness, and perhaps the struggle for voice must accept some losses. Contemplation is slow become a joy again, and I follow that piper in hope.
Correspondingly yours,
Ned