Marooned

April 3, 2009

Here I am, adrift in another of these formless weeks. Is it Friday today? I used to love Fridays, which were illuminated from behind by the pleasures of the weekends, their plain surfaces translucent so that they glowed like paper lanterns. I used to look through the surface of days to what they promised. I used to feel, with my hand pressed against them as it pressed against the railing of a bus or the panel of a door, their part in the structure of time – an undulation whose next curve or hollow one could anticipate, a shape offering hope or providing some hidden crevice in which to rest.

Now the surface of days is opaque.

I am too full of some desire or some frustration to name it. I am trying to talk with my mouth full. While my left hand struck buttons on the keyboard and my right hand wrote in a notebook, a second set of hands was cramming my mouth with this need and, as with a ramrod, forcing it down into my stomach until I was packed to the lips. Does this bespeak an imminent explosion?

Maybe there’s nothing for it but to go to sea. Going to sea would be like writing poetry, I think: immersive yet denuding; rapturous; confounding. An escape from life into something more like it than itself. This is nonsense. So, probably, is the wish to sail on the ocean – or motor along, however it’s done now. Here’s to nonsense! Here’s to the kind of nonsense that bubbles up from some great body moving far below, leagues down, in the dark, that maybe is a true thing. Not to this lifeless nonsense one is obliged to construct every day in striving to ingratiate oneself to this or that person – like gluing toothpicks to form an ugly, little scaffolding for teacher’s praise. Here’s to nonsense riding the waves endlessly and blinding sailors with wild glares of reflected light. Let’s sail to China and lose, somewhere along the way, our despair to those crushing and pacific depths.