i can never write, these days, without going on and on. i'm sick with searching to rid a hunger that cannot be sated.
all writers have one thing in common and it's fucking insanity, i think. even if it's pretty. even if it's the most beautiful words painting the most stunning picture. anyone that writes more than once is insane.
i don't make it beautiful, i try not to. just because it's not. never is.
Coleridge said poetry is the best words in the best order. That's why it's the work of a madman. Every piece is another attempt to defy the innate ineffability of anything, to fight everything about nature itself to find some kind of peace in existing.
Language is not made for the abstract malady that is human passions. It's like compressing a file. You cant get it across without leaving most of it out, and sure, a message gets across, but is it good enough? When it's blurry, it's easier for the information to get lost.
how do you grasp something that is said in every hand held, tear shed, note in the margins, bitter goodbye, neck craned to the stars, broken bone, sleeping child, plant watered, letter written, gasping laugh, choking sob, cat pet, dog-eared page, first breath taken, last, and so on. that everything is infinite and the same.
It's pure fanaticism. manic. trying to transfer a feeling to someone. writing is reaching out to grab anyone at all, shake them by the shoulders and ask "do you understand me? do you feel it? do we feel it the same? humanity? are we all the same dust in different shapes? am i alone? please, god, am i alone?"
it's human. it's so painfully human. it's what we send out to each other, to anyone that will listen, out into space, just in case. we are so scared of being alone. even with all of us together, we are a lonely species, planet, galaxy. writing is insanity and mortality.
(11/08-21 addition)
but: it has forever been, and always will, in spite of efforts, be loneliness that perseveres.
how lonely it is to think.
how lonely it is to feel.
how lonely it is to live solitary inside one's own existence.
i can't help but believe, in this, that i understand the monster Shelley writes of. he's not human, maybe, but he's an amalgam of them. lonely species. lonely planet. lonely galaxy. i will always be alone in my head, i will always be alone with the meanings of the words i say, i will always be sitting in this dark room with this burning bright spotlight hoping the migraine folds in spite of it. everything ive ever felt has been unique. everything you've ever felt has been unique. and maybe there has never ever been a duplicate emotion experienced, true understanding shared, in the long but terribly short history of Us.
People speak of love. And of sorrow. And of memories. And people nod and share their own. And it echoes an unvarying feedback loop through all of time. But nobody ever understands more than they believe themselves to, anything beyond the boundless tree of Happenings that lays in their wake, that holds their very self, and maybe, maybe, there have been ones close to matching, but isn't a branch or two of divergence enough to send the whole structure toppling down? I've never understood a word you've said. and you never any of mine, not truly, not the way you want, or I want. we sleep on beds of approximation. we are all souls aching to climb inside one another to find out a truth we never ever will see, pressing skin to skin like it might work, gripping tight just in case, and so. Is it truly surprising. That we writhe around, aching to soothe a loneliness that is written into our very world? do you think the stars ache for the same closeness? do they envy blue stragglers?
