writing ix

writing is neither magic nor a discipline. it is a prayer without any gods.

who writes for any audience? one writes for the rules that break the rules.

if writing is mostly waiting, why don’t writing workshops keep infinite waiting lists without any placement, fulfillment? then i might believe writing can be taught.

the bicycle trumps language in freedom. but language trumps the bicycle in mobility.

i inevitably say that i wonder if i wish i had never been introduced to writing. but i was. and now even the moon is ugly. and the unflushed toilet rises over the horizon of beauty like an amulet in a time of crisis.

writing rides a great bird of a 40 kilometer wingspan to the south pole in june. it skitters onto the back of a fish so vast one can see neither its head nor tail and travels to the victorious rainforests. yet one who writes neither rides nor is ridden, but sits in a shack of orbiting molecules glimpsing the flying of the bird and the swimming of the fish through bloated fogs.

i am a skeleton and writing is my flesh. so when the beautiful come to me and strip i say, i am a skeleton – let us put on words and then maybe we can sleep together. but the others often think they already are fleshed. and so we stare at each other across a valley of bones.

writing contains horrors in its jurisdiction. but this is saying nothing. every republic contains these. writing’s distinction is that its horrors are the simulations of the horrors of all other republics – including those that simulate other horrors. and this without end.

i’ve spent over 45,000 hours in aimless writing as an adult, caged by vision. at what point is the apprenticeship complete? i ask my non-existent master. at what point can i open up my own shop and sell my goods? and my non-existent master says, some who write are apprenticed in domains that exchange – if they exchange at all – unknown currencies, who are masters only at apprenticeship. because they have no master and thus don’t know how to be one, because they have too many masters and thus are overwhelmed by mastery, or because they are slow and the human span is insufficient to graduate from apprenticeship? i ask. but there is only a white page and silence and a trace of questions.

writing is a mode of existence. is it such a mode that one can be one of writing without writing? and this by entering a writing of writing in the way one can enter a poetry of poetry, a thinking of thinking, a behind behind behind – these innate attributes of mysticism? is this achieved by migrating the restraint of writing from exotericism to esotericism, from the whiteness of the page to the whiteness of the pageless void, a becoming that alchemically alters writing to be not itself, purifying word into silence?