What have I failed to record in the last two months? So, so many things. Writing belongs to and further begets a cycle; introspection, feeling, articulation, writing (the crudest step), introspection, and so on. Interestingly - in the way so much of life surprises us just when we think we are coming to know it - though writing has not improved my writing nearly as I thought it would, it has improved my introspection, my feeling, and my articulation.
All of life feels all around me at any moment, as it seldom has in my life. How is that for fluff? Or: where does it leave me?
It leaves me with a bravery I would normally not express, to go find whatever I do not have. Thank goodness for randomness, because something has convinced me to go looking. I took a week off of work on short notice to drive. I have loose, incomplete plans for this time. I will spend the first few days in eastern Utah, at Canyonlands and thereabout. I hope to get lost over the next few days, and hike, write, and roam as I wish. I hope that this is for itself - as all such acts should be - but it is also, in a more primitive way, about a notion in my head.
My dreams at night are like looking over a fence that I cannot cross; what is over there? And how are we made, that we can desire something new so often - and be revealed those desires in our sleep every night - and seemingly never run out? Jung believed dreams expressed imbalance. What does my consciousness tell me? That although I have the hardest time putting words to them (as is simply part of the same mystery), I do have some intuitive sense of them. It is faint (for their nature), but it is there.
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While we are at it, what else have I failed to record - or to save record of - in the last ten years?
- Countless story ideas and fragments
- Many melodies, lyrics, songs
- Ton upon ton of old photos, digital and print
- Any consequential record of my thoughts
- Any meditation on my memories, or reference from which to later judge the way they change
- Any record of what it has felt like to be me
How are these things accomplished? Certainly, I could have learned to back up my hard drive before we lost audio we had recorded for the fifteenth time; but by the time you get to the bottom of the list, the problem has long ceased to be technology. The difficulty to transcend the barriers of self is singularly astounding. I can read this own blog - from whatever period of time I was posting with reasonable frequency - and still my conclusion is that I have captured the merest trifle of what it felt like to be me, at that time. If that weren't bad enough, the times when I have captured it have been the shallowest times - those where the experience of being me was simple enough that even I, with my own talent for writing, could capture it. For the moments I most wish to remember, there is simply no substitute to cherishing the memories.
