Day 70

My head still fuzzy from deep sleep. Totally weird dreams last night. DJs and parties, restaurants serving swill. Wandering without belongings. Waking in strange paces. Not belonging. Following not leading. Loneliness and the feeling of being outside everything, of not having anyone, not anyone, to talk with, to share with. A mess of things. My rucksack emptied and ransacked. Always rooms up stairs, never on the ground floor. Unfamiliar faces. Waking.

This Craft
When we were beginning in this craft
Before the internet was invented
We cut up newspapers and essays
To jumble their words, as millions had
Done before us, and to put them
Together in a different order in
The hope that they would make sense
Of our world. It was guesswork, then,
To make paper patterns with glue
And scissors.

“Always to evade these disgraces” was
The first one, and it sticks in my mind
Forever, transferred onto paper
With a typewriter whose letters stuck
And smeared too much ink on
The small pages I could find. They’re
In a box somewhere behind me
Marked Writings, and numbered
By someone else who was told to
Find treasures in my trove, and never
Did. I forget his name, and don’t care.

The lesson I learned was to trust
Myself, and my ordering of the
World, my instinctive setting of
Expressions in patterns, and to
Understand that how I wrote was
How I thought, and that chaos had
More value than science, emotion
More goodness than analysis.
First draft is final draft
More often than not. Impulse
Is reality.

All generalisations …
We know the rest.

I’m still searching for a new language.

AGGIE’S ART OF HAPPINESS – CHAPTER 27