The
day has gone, the light has faded. Night has come, its hours are
slipping by. Time moves quickly when it wants, never when you want it
to. It has moods, just as you or I. It undoes, it influences. As do
art and books and music and conversation, good or bad. It, they,
corrupt. Change, in subtle ways, what you were working on. Something
new emerges. But is it novel? Its not what you set out to say, it's
not how you wanted it to close. It's not what you intended, but there
it is.
A
gap, where your ideas are worked up but not worked upon, alters the
whole course of the whatever you're working on. Sometimes in the mind
alone and not in any physical, visible form. Then you return to the
work in progress and the words, ideas that seemed so right then seem
so wrong. They leap off the page, they run away, they hide, in plain
sight, from you. What you had, maybe just yesterday, has been lost.
It refuses to be added to, and only allows itself to be tinkered
with. The fire with which you wrote has dampened overnight and it
doesn't appear as though it will be reignited. A junction will insert
itself, which to you will be obvious and so you assume to everyone
else.
But
there's nothing to be done. No cure. The thread will not, cannot
be,
picked up. And so what do you do? You carry on, because that's the
recycled slogan isn't it? You carry on carrying on. You could scrub
it, but the first part of the work is good. Short, too short to be
anything, but good all the same. However, the you that wrote it is no
longer in evidence and cannot be called upon. There must be a way,
there has to be a way to finish it. Before the flame dies, if it
hasn't died. Before the bats announce dusk - because that's what they
do at least in your head if not in nature - the piece will again be
picked up and the same needle that yesterday was weaving in and out
will be threaded with new thread.
Pop
is at the window watching flitting bats circle against the backdrop
of a reddened sky. You see that in your mind's eye, as well as you
standing next to and a little behind him. You as you were. Him as he
was. Then. Now it's just a picture. The house is not his house. The
house is not part of the family. The house has for some years
belonged to somebody else. The bats have disappeared, no new
descendants to replace the old. This will be thought as the thread
recommences work or threatens to snap and undo any links that had
been made earlier, in preparation.
Preparedness
fires the imagination, but the imagination too fired is a hindrance.
For when the time comes to make sense of it, nothing can be made
sense of. A new puzzle to grapple with or to forget and tear up. By
thinking and continuing to think before the thing is complete you
have stressed and strained the fabric. It looks pinched in places.
The thread too tight; too loose in others. You have no idea of what
you're sewing. But sew you must, whether it be mending or making. The
thread itself doesn't have an opinion. It can be corrupted, it can be
interrupted; it doesn't care. It enables hands and voice to imitate
or to draw from its own well. It disables thought and judgement. It
is a wave, with its own tide. A tide that never tires of reinvention.
It's
not the thread of a novel; there's too many of them. It's not even
the thread of a short story, for it breaks at will, at random, and
prevents the ending, ends it with no ending. These thin threads I
continue to take up but they can't be the thread of life-work.
Picture credit: The Mice Sewing the Mayor's Coat, 1902, Beatrix Potter; Illustration for The Tailor of Gloucester (source: WikiArt).
Written January 2020.
