intermission #2

You should be listening to something soft, intense, and melancholy as you read this. Like this.

Now I will tell you - I'm all over the place this evening. I'm not interested in writing something tidy or entertaining, or something I won't regret tomorrow. I will regret it tomorrow, I'm sure of it. Public ramblings are not usually my thing. But I digress.

Conversations come and go. It can feel like the sun is pouring through, for a second, and then after the shade is drawn again, and I carry on, the same. Is anything changing? Does anything need to change?

I suddenly, last night, felt this gust of air pass into me - like a shock of cold water when the heat is killing you, and every molecule is there, awake - so unpleasant and pleasant - and something true came in, and I wrote it down, and shared it with friends, and a conversation I was wrapped up in continued - and it wasn't, after all, what I was feeling at all. It came out, a bit, a little hint, but got lost in some other distraction, the need to make sense of what doesn't make sense. The language wasn't one I speak. How can you feel and speak, and expect one to be faithful to the other?

So it felt like something was emerging, and because the feeling was so powerful it felt like it must be right, but what was said was hopelessly incomplete, off on the wrong tangent, mortifyingly self-indulgent, and, in the end, words and nothing else. I felt, afterward, like I had no voice. So I'm wondering again, what has changed?

The satisfaction of expressing an idea - just to know that the idea can be shared, and listened to - is something everyone needs, probably. But ideas don't manifest themselves. I believe, now, in failure - doing a thing knowing that I will probably fail, and delighting in it none the less, because it is more than words. I'm interested in what can happen, what I can do, now, as an attempt to make the world viscerally mine, without fear of failure. I want to feel what is outside of my presumptions, fears, and manners - not just feel, but grasp it and caress it and throw it through a brick wall.