The overhang continues its eastward journey, letting the sun peer underneath its edge. The boundary has now moved past my feet; warming below my legs still cool in the morning breeze. The humidity is rising, or else the coffee sweats are about to break. The tip of the pen still swirls across the paper, barely controlled and crashing above and below the lines. Every once in a while I go back over a word or two to make the letters clear enough that I might be able to read it later. Someone approaches the table just as the song is ending, and I push Pause and take my earbuds out.
“This seat taken?”
No, no, go ahead and take it.
“There’s nowhere to take it to. May I join you? May we share this table?”
Oh geez, sorry. Sure. Let me move some of this crap.
“You can stay spread out, but I might not be able to keep from peeking.”
Ah, no. You wouldn’t want to do that. Might sprain your eyes trying to make it out.
“Then,… I’ll wait,… until you post it. Or publish?” She says that last bit in a way that makes me stop and look her in the eye.
Say, what’s this all about?
“I have a confession to make. This isn’t a chance meeting. I have something for you.” She hands me a small dark card, sturdy stock with an embossed edge. I open it to read the message inside. It’s simply: “Tag! I dare you to answer all of her questions. Paul.” I look around, but no one seems to be watching us. She places her cup on the table and holds another out to me.
“This is from him too.”
I have to laugh, I can’t help it, caught in the force of a memory.
“What’s funny about a coffee?”
Nothing, no it’s nothing. Thank you. Thanks much.
Then I have to laugh again. She gives me a look.
Okay. Promise not to take it the wrong way? It’s just that the last time Paul sent a woman over with a drink for me it was in a, um, different setting. And now, there’s questions? What kind of questions?
“Questions about this.” She opens her hands apart over the scrawled-over papers on the table.
About this. Hmm. I take a sip of the coffee, and it’s good. Well, if you’re sure there’s nothing else, I’ll answer your questions.
She sips her coffee, leans across the table to put it down next to mine, and lingers. “We’ll at least start with the questions.” She gives her lower lip a quick bite as she sits back up. Getting out a padfolio, she opens to a middle page and asks:
1: Why write?
Well, because it all happens too much too fast, both the outside rushing and the inside inability to grasp long on any one thing, both a lack of focus and an absence of a focal point. Take this coffee in a cup: the ceramic from the earth, from stone, cast by hands to have purpose within a discernable shape, the solidness of the cup in contrast to the fluidity of the drink, and the ungraspable steam escaping off the top, the sugar mixed in, the flavor created by the blend and the memory of the past, the heat having been put into it and the heat escaping into the room into the building into the neighborhood, the pull between it and the Earth, the indiscernible tides from every other mass subsumed under the swirl I put into it by moving the cup. You could start at any one of those and start and never finish. Each item an infinity and in turn a component of an infinity, and in all the all-ness of it there’s something, something I find myself in the thrall of, but that releases me before I can comprehend it. 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses aren’t enough to nearly keep up. So, to take a moment of it, to try and capture it, to even capture a portion of it, and hope there’s something…
What’s next?
2. Aesthetic?
That’s a question? No, sorry, mostly I would try to say it’s something like, Get Out Of The Way. Something I have still never managed to do to my satisfaction. I see my work suffering because of it, but still can’t stop.
Also, remind me later, I’ve got a funny story about aestheticians. Well, I think it’s funny. Actually, never mind that, what else you got?
3. Process?
There’re always a couple of images first. Maybe it’s a couple of lines of dialogue, which is just another way of saying an image of a conversation. Even if it’s the dialogue, I have a feeling of the setting, the meaning behind the way it's delivered. I start writing out the image, which brings out the idea that I use to string the images on. I have a set of images waiting for the right string to be a part of. Sometimes the idea never occurs to me, but the images are powerful enough to demand to stand on their own. These scare me, because I’m sure there’s an idea that I’m just resistant to. For this reason, they are also the most compelling to me. Let’s move on, before I start thinking too much about it and start screwing it all up.
4. The Moment Right Now?
You mean this heartbeat? This minute of the planetary arc? This step of civilization? This turn on the wheel? The moment of speaking? Writing? Typing? Reading? This brief near-connection between you and I? There are too many moments coinciding, and so there is no moment at all. In fact, it seems so tenuous, I fear if we try to stay in it, we might all disappear. Ask me your next question.
5. Shortcomings?
All the finitenesses, of myself, of duration, of the tools, of possibility. But then, without them, there would be no reason to write.
Anything else?
I handed her my notebook, and my pen.
She said there was something else before we were done with the official reason for her coming by, that I was to tag 6 others to answer the questions.
If I’ve been tagged, everyone else has already done it.
