This Writing Mind
2006
You need a voice to write, I’ve heard. Inside me, silvered waters ceaselessly pour teeth and claws through growling clefts where gorgons and dragons rest, guarding treasures of a psyche. Inside pours a mineral flooded river the color of chocolate, and the river flows on forever as the words line up inside to leave me.
You need a voice to write and I have a voice, but it’s a sparkly splintered sundog, a wave-train river run, glare on the tracks, too untidy, loose and windy, laced with frets, drops, and here comes another list. Blessed goddamn list-poems. In addition to bi-polar mood disorder, and dyslexia, I have something called ADD/ADHD mind. Alphabet-minded-diagnoses that means I can’t sit still, can’t focus or organize much, am plagued and lit-up by impulsivity.
In Jewish myth, there are 72 names of god, and 72 kinds of wisdom. I’m not a good Jew, more Jew-ish—a JewWitch—but under all my doubts and sometimes full-on fury at god, I am worshipful of Creation. Both the creation that surrounds me and that pouring from me are sacred because I know, with a religious faith, that I’m the creation that I’m the creator of.
Being a writer with ADHD is tricky. ADHD is going through your life in tap shoes. It’s a dance between less-compelling impulsivities. It’s all about the tap shoes, baby. Hummingbird-lifestyle-days, hitting walls for hours till I fall into the thesaurus and stay awhile, totally satisfied. “Leisure” is set in opposition to “endeavor” in the thesaurus, but I am full of endeavors in my leisure.
Sifting the granularities of my daily life—which might be shit and might be diamonds—standing ear-deep in it and continuing pushing this pen, coaxing the keyboard as it all rises higher till the rose of sky opens, and sniffing towards that blossom, I lift my tool, shove through the lid of limit and self-doubt. I am here, mixed metaphors and all.
Most times, when I think I’m done, it’s just the edge of the beginning. So many edges—confronted by beginnings, i circle above my body—it’s too scary to be touching down. Like in a plane when that fucking moment arrives for bouncing down on something real, a solid surface after all that soaring. Finally land to face that first-edit full of terror—better to error in thinking I’m done.
I am a womin in a forest made of glass and filled with light. All the world drips like honey down the sides of my jar. Calling you, Nature, in voice of sunlight to come inside, penetrate my sparkle blood, soothe this wrinkled breath. Calling you, Culture, with knives and a whet stone, to critique the life-hating/woman-hating/Nature-hating human world. There’s the familiar shuffling between urgency and strategy, and then, the moment to begin. Nature never begins, never ends, but I’m just a human, on the verge of breaking through the vertical and vivid vastness of my culture’s complex silence. There’s bloating emptiness, excitement, and a volcano erupting.
Friends say I’m so smart, but I’m not. What I am is fast. My brain is so much faster than most other peoples’, faster than it should be in ratio to my meaning-making processes, and so I can come up with witticisms, jokes, smart-assery, I skim all social surfaces like a pelican but that’s not “smart”. Smart is solving problems. Smart is organizing my shit. Smart is understanding the world, or just editing this one page. I go round and round, bound to chaos on a spiral ride and what I am now is more confused than ever, but confused on a higher level. That’s evolution I guess.
I’m a Hedonist with ADD and excesses of time, space, energy. Been labelled lazy, in a life arranged around analysis, research and subversive imagination instead of a sequence of stepping stone goals towards some destination called grown-up. Called success, or wealth. At this life-long refusal of submission I am rich, wise, and oh-so successful. Well-to-do as anyone, thank you very much.
I shun consumption but I dig accumulation. I’m acquisitive as a crow. Stuff just comes to me. Friends give me objects because I make very little actual money, and i’m physically smaller than most and they’ve outgrown their clothes. Also, experiences, friends, lovers, adventures, come to me, and i hoard them like jewels, complex gorgeous beads I string into necklaces. Lovers come, add their juice to the stew, move on or revolve endless, as beloved exes. Commitment to fabulous fantasies of romance or travel wax and wane. It’s a catch and release situation.
I live inside of Yashi, the straw bale palace I built with my pals, the greatest recycled home for a hedonist in all the production-obsessed world. I sit, idle spider in the center in the sunshine in the beauty, blessed and waiting for it, because free people recline, motherfucker—it’s in the bible! I sit just above the center, bouncing gently on this iridescent web, wanting every sparkle, knowing it’s a flowing tribute that lasts as long as I last and just to be sure, I don’t plan to last too long. I have plans for my exit—I got a strategy.
I’ve leaned left for a lifetime, as dropped out of patriarchy as a post-modern, pre-apocalypse human can be in this world. Refusing to work for the man is a privilege, shunning wage slavery and ambition is a gift. I know how to get what I need without money, and I know how to need less.
I know that golden aspen leaves look best back-lit by late-day sun, and I can impersonate crows, magpies, and decent folk if I have to. I know how to whistle through a grass-blade, how to grow pot and apple trees from seeds, and make most anybody laugh, even cops. I don’t know how to change a baby’s diaper, but I know how to change a demented geriatric persons’. I’m anxious around technology and credit cards, but not spooked of mountain lions, wolves or bears. I don’t know how to use Venmo, but I know how to build a fire and can tell you all the moon’s cycles. I can’t do math, but I can read a room, an astrology chart, and animal tracks in the snow. I don’t know how to sell myself but I can seduce anyone. I don’t have the patience for rush hour traffic but I can make a poem out of any ol’ day. I can’t identify with with capitalism, perfectionists, or republicans, but I can identify patterns of most trees, flowers, bird flight, and mental illnesses.
Look at this writer’s life—it’s fucking beautiful! Wide and sheltered and deep in bits where I went, teaspoon in hand to quest and question, conquer and be flayed open-hearted by the grief and the beauty I find. Kindness covers it all in flowers, fury lashes storms from the heated center to every leafy green edge. These steps aren’t GPS googled directions, more an improvisational dance, a blossoming haiku banging out grace in tap shoes.
It’s this mind, goddess, like a smoking censor, this swinging chain through the fog that rules my days, exhausts me trying to track it, or to just keep up. Meditation helps, and so does watching the leaves in the river, or melting ice, surrendering to seasonal strobes that don’t stop, and never taking all this too seriously. It’s always mythic in here, always a metaphor—asking daily, what’s this meta-for?
Writing with my metabolism, hummingbird, I just go on my nerve. I’m a grammatical terrorist. I want to take you to the edge, sort of safely, where you can reach out a bit from the edge and maybe touch into this other stuff, but really, it’s this other stuff that interests me.This laboratory of vocabulary. The way words work. The way words fuck on the page. Writing as sex, a way to locate and milk the energies. Some sort of flintstone striking.
And sometimes I carry a long, gently curved stick while I wander in the woods in the velvet air, and I hold it up in my two hands over my one head, and in this way I’m constantly framing archways into other worlds. I am the threshold that I cross. This feels like deep magic, the long, curving magic of a human life. Ever-arriving through portals, windows, and the privilege of beauty. And the privilege of grief.
I’ve unhitched my deeds from the quaint plow of necessity, but not from the stars I long to join. Like the Incredible Shrinking Man, I long to, am ready to pass on. It’s cosmic—I can see how easy it would be to melt like ice in the river, to step across that line, the final fuck-you to my kind, the un-speakable unwinding of evolution. The buck stopping here, I could just die.
These days, my Mama is dying, and I have tasks—call her doctor, her lawyer, call her insurance company —these are dull words that yoke my days, pierced with dark bundles of chemicals, bundles of kindling, bundles of nerve fibers. Bundles of words I’ve written—stacks of books bundled in heaps of twice-used papers—language packages always ready to stretch out, or to burn. Ever reaching towards the finished version. The someday-me, watching open-mouthed from my perch on tilting bundles of pages, that avalanche of words loose in gravity as I race back and forth through endless loops of jewel necklaced, reckless days, tidying backhoe buckets full of sentences.
One honeyed stem feeds the hole yearning to be whole, the aching emptiness, the emotional wilderness, the great swings of middle age—egoic, biochemical, astrological—till time is meaningless and there’s nothing to recall except a thrillion words on a zillion pages, a longing that one match can cure, forever. My heart’s avalanche—a freight train coming off the mountain, fast and hard, taking whole treed slopes, families, communities with it.
If I have to come back when I die, let me come as a bird or a cloud to rain for ten thousand years on the land, on birds and trees. The stories of trees, the hinges of seasons, the revelation of mycellia and animal tracks keep me sort of sane. I gain identity and entry to doors and gateways. The story of blizzard and sunshine, the feel of tires on a mountain road, the silence of the earth beneath my pillow when I practice listening for Life’s stories. The stories of the world embrace me as presence.
But what are these stories anyway? Just the bare science of observation cloaked in imagination, which itself is the shining input of another realm really. Attention, presence, awareness, precision, being here now—the yearning to connect, and with minds more than human. What can save us? I save my own self, again and again, by my muscular, corpuscular ability to create, to tell a different story, this mind the sacred ladder I climb each day, grammar lassoing limbs in the jungle, language weaving green alphabet bridges over mute dripping gorges, the gorgeous alchemical ingredient that shifts simple awareness to poetry.
The first story was to escape the world. The next story was to confront the world. The last story is to engage the world. For two years, I’ve worked to gather my life into an over-flowing website. I hold the pen like riding a wild horse fast through a dense forest. Leaning in and lying flat as truth whips past.
Desire carries me, harries me, marries and crucifies me. I wrestle with the great work of making meaning. I write to tame shadow and light, to restore shape and texture to the orphaned feelings, to drizzle the world onto the page, stained with the dazzle of the inner gaze, and flying off like a comet to connect with the underworld and the cosmos.
To Connect. The act of writing tames my loneliness and my terror of coercion. I wrote through the persistent isolation of my urban childhood. Writing taught me to reach out and to share. These words bring me into the company of others, thinking thoughts like hands and arms that can touch in space, in time. Language offers a heart-mirror, proof that I exist, that someone maybe is listening. You—thoughts, pen, page—you make me exist.
I write while I hike. I write while I drive. Dangerous. Here, writing at the edge of my river—armored, blasted and bent—an eternity of water stair-steps. A tawny stripe, a golden flowing rococo channel. You, ruffled shout, tempered ruffian. You, eternal child, delirious accumulation. You, beauty I honor who owes me nothing. Always you’re yessing and never the same. For you, I‘ve claimed the right to a Voice and to Imagination—those great tools of witness. From you I learn ease and flow, and I try not to be attached, while I long all the same to be attached.
It's memoir that i write, poetical, political, stream of consciousness nature- worshipping memoir. There’s the life in the body—the medical sojourns, the flood, the parents dying slowly, faster and faster, Life in extremis. There’s political tragedy, poetical comedy. Singularity I’ve always been, living radical and thundering down into the racing waters of myself. This adventure—writing all the time.
Here, where I talk to my soul, to this world that doesn't email or phone, but calls me in song voice. To the thousands of trees that watch me all day long, an inscription to the wind that rocks me, the sun and stars that glitter in my bloodstream. Love poems to the world is what I write. What I seek is a bio-socket for my plug. Swinging my cord all day long, in search of any port. Any storm.
I’ve been a victim, a symptom, a risky contradiction. The animal cry on the edge of the human voice. The wind screams past the panes of winter between my inner sanctum’s scarlet geranium flowers and the pines out there. The late January sun sets. I stop and place myself there, in the way of the Beauty, and let that sun shine on my forehead, honeyed warmth delivers me home into this waiting body.
That I wrote it all down makes me happy. So what if the climate-change methane bubble is gonna burst and kill all human life before I can publish my five or sixty books full of toldnesses? I’ve tried my best. I have this Life and it’s perfect. I follow the pen that guides and supports me towards this mostly-painless birth that never stops. This alone is the full proof and texture of myself, and so I savor and keep walking, folding loose paper, shoving pens into all my pockets, holy witness grazing on eye feasts and mind tripping over the radiance. I’m the tour guide and the crowd, the pointer floating before my own senses, showing the way. There! There! There!
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