Flames of Insight Curling on the Edges of the Burning Paper

You create this writing. Yes, you do. I write the words, their coherencies dancing to my inner rhythms, but you create the meaning that the words impart. You, the reader, control my writing. Okay, that is going a little far, but I do write for your reading. When you completely miss the point of what I wrote I think it's me, not you. I wasn't clear enough; it's not that you have problems with comprehension, though in my darker moments I will admit I've thought this.

There are different groups of readers too. Who comprehend differently from each other. Offering your writing to different groups can be an interesting experience. But I won't get into that. Oh, and whoever leaves the first comment often defines how that piece will be interpreted and responded to. I often make it a point not to read the other comments until I've commented. I want a pure connection with the writing that doesn't need to line up with the 'group-think' because it's sure of itself. I personally like independently thought-out comments. On the other hand, when discussions get going, that's great too.

The comments often enable the next piece of writing. We are audiences, then, who shape each other's writing. It's reader-response carried to a newly imagined level, this critical approach to literature, but greatly speeded up in the blogosphere. The process of reception and meaning-making that enables the writing to live beyond the page it is written on.

Blossom

Should a flower not open to the sun because there is nightfall?

Should a flower, soft, delicate, trusting, not blossom magnificently, brilliant unfurling full petals, splashing perfume, colour to the world, inviting pollination, growing rich seeds for the future, pods full of grace, because the sun is swallowed up by darkness?

Outside, looking in.

Metaphors aren't arising. Something resists them. It's a constructed world that perhaps is a metaphor for its own processes. Of corporate wealth built on bodies of work. Of living off the crème of interest payments. Capitalism is "borrowing from the future."¹ These wide berths of marble pillars and floors and tabletops, of huge glass chandeliers and sophisticated stores, of pin stripe people, confident but wary, built on profits from debt payments. What enables one to have what one can't afford, now. Purchases contingent on future payments that gouge the paychecks of the present. A future that barely exists, or does as a distant phantom. All around me at the Food Court where I sip coffee and write in my notebook, not the upper echelons of power but office staff. Thin plastic credit cards already overloaded, mortgages, car payments. And a disjuncture in the metaphors of financial power that the structures are a concretization of. Profits from the excesses of the moneylenders practices, this glimmering, gleaming Mecca of wealth. What if we chose to live within our means - would corporate complexes of banks like those surrounding me vanish into the mirages they are?
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¹ Cited at I Cite:

Zizek writes: "Lacan's notion of the debt that pertains to the very notion of the symbolic order is strictly homologous to this capitalist debt: sense as such is never 'proper'; it is always advanced, 'borrowed from the future'; it lives on the account of the virtual future sense."

Relation Of

Monsieur, you can't be possessed. Any woman who would try to possess you doesn't understand you.

One can only come into a relation of love with you.

How did...

How did you write that poem? How did you paint that painting? How did you find that friend? How did you know to be in that place at that particular time? How did you know how to escape that situation or choose that deal?

Unrepeatable and beyond explanation. Nor can you properly impart the sense of wonder you felt at what happened.

The series of apparently random coincidences that occurred to get you from point A to C were actually specific. A specific sequence. Intuition got you there.

It's a trustworthy navigator.

But requires 'letting go.'

In this way, it is akin to religious belief.

Living your prayer; living your wishes.

Putting aside your tiny maps and trusting that you know the way.

Let go. And find what you are looking for.

'Self-Portrait in Bathroom Mirror' Shots

Bought a new sweater today, have a new job, may be moving into a new apartment, a whole lot of new things, I guess. Not great photos, but what the heck...

Hesitancy

What position doesn't fluctuate? If the real is what returns to itself, can I? How can I stop the constant shifting, my heart, my muse?

Monsieur, I cannot flow in one direction. Despite effort, a contradictoriness. Potent feelings flow in opposite directions, collide, aren't neat, contained, tidy or even explicable. While I would like to not be confused, unsure, and have only my own fears to battle, I am a storm of paradoxes.

Always departing, never arriving.

Can writing write this impossibility? Such honour of the heart.

I curve and sway with your rhythms in a dance of intimacy. We are a single flower, padma lotus, spectral whiteness of prisms, following an inner light, its lightning, even as the moon's tides surge in us.

It happened suddenly, in the quietness of the moment.

Afterwards, enwrapped, arms of peace, and a peace that lasts for many days. And then the breaking, chaos swirls over.

There is a way through. A way through the resisting what we are approaching, pulling away, succumbing, falling back. Even with the red and white blossoms that perhaps notice us or don't, roses of love with baby's breath in the pale blue art deco vase on the table beside the nightlight. Even in the cramped place with roots behind the walls that we can't see, on the soft pale cream sheets. In reciprocity.