Tuesday, November 3, 2009

The Long Now:

Embryonic debris drifts across my vision--eye floaters, they're called; I try to focus on one, but the attention causes the floater to vanish. When I was little, I thought I was seeing paramecia crawl across my eye.

I should apologize to Sable Salieri: I've imagined your story, but I'm unable to produce it on paper. Countless others have suffered a similar fate [Eli Drake, Briar, et al.], but your nonexistence seems more unfair: you were special; all my other nonexistent writing was supposed to lead to your existence--you were supposed to be my apotheosis.

After nearly a year, I'm still reading
A Confederacy Of Dunces; I'm trying to finish the book, but it's painful to read my own biography [and have my biography be considered a comic fugue]; I am Ignatius J. Reilly--I am, I am, I am. I worry how the book will end, I guess.

"The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock" [a rare exception to poetry's jejuneness] contains the best sentence ever penned:
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
Yes, yes, and why wasn't I? I've dreamed I was in an ancient sea, silent and ethereal; I've dreamed it so lucidly, so why shouldn't I be there? I've been there, so why can't I be there? I can't imagine anything crueler than a dream: I experience a paradise, only to lose it upon waking; I am eternally leaving Eden.

A musing; a reaffirmation--an exclamation! Another musing [an aside].

I spent several summers on the shores of northern lakes: canoeing through morning mist, fishing for northern pike; serenaded by cicadas while watching the aurora borealis; sitting in bucolic, forgotten libraries, reading Kurt Vonnegut. All paradises, all lost.

And I am only twenty years old: only a quarter of my life has been spent, and already memories are too cruel; I remember so many lost paradises, and I can never return to any of them. Sixty years of summer sunsets and winter window shopping--I can't imagine so much time.

1 comment:

  1. You're only twenty?! Or is this a fictional character that you're writing as?

    If A Confederacy of Dunces is making you sad, maybe you should switch to another book for awhile. Perhaps there's a book out there that will remind you of yourself in a more positive light.

    By the way, you're a really good writer. Please post more often. :-)

    ReplyDelete

Followers