The Night comes quickly

The Night comes quickly

10/5/2001

when you stay up to read and watch tv and write. Has been a long while since i've enjoyed the night with its coolness and silence. The intricacies of a moment become expanded when you are aware of the heightened sensations found in darkness. What is eclipsed is the quickness, the efficency of light. What is probed is the churning of the electric fan, the spinning of its plastic case.

After a while, sensation becomes fabricated and thought takes over the immediacy of feeling. I feel because I know I'm supposed to feel and all is mediated by expectation. I've realised that writing slowly has an exhausting effect. It becomes a measurement of what you dare to say because each word is weighed. If all was narrative, how pointless it would be, for the strict linearity would merely propose a point, irredeemably receding into the distance. But writing becomes circular. The point returns upon itself - not movement towards a centre - but returning in word on word. Not a direct mapping, but a recurrance. If all writing moved forward, where would dimensionality go? We write in spaces too complex to map and the circle merely express the inability to comprehend the lines spinning, moving, writing. I fall down on language because it proposes a scheme too grand, proposes direction and distance. But these are random thoughts, merely spaces in a density.

Remembered: Dr Adair

Remembered A Noiseless Patient Spider

A noiseless patient spider
I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated
Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launched forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them
and you O my soul where you stand,
surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold
till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

Walt Whitman