Tuesday, February 21, 2017

There are the blips and the blurbs of the writer's mind and sketchbook, scraps of paper with lines, the thoughts that have no immediate joint, no standout alpha.


A sort of waking dream, after a bad cold, aches and pains from head to toe, as I found myself feeling somewhat better amidst all the imposed rest that had been building for a long time in the struggle.  I lie on the tribal rug and feel beneath the outer wrapping many rolled nets in layers pulled from a sea, such that the collection of nets is alive, almost as if there were a horde of tiny sea creatures gurgling about, as I drip on the outside, iodine and seaweeded, as if pulled from drowning or a long day on the cold sea in a curragh, leather skinned it is like me, black on the outside from tar on peat bog worthy skin and the ribs of found wood.  A tiny crab or shrimp -like creature would be at the big end of the scale as fluids adjust and I concentrate one by one on each nodule of vertebrae for how they all fit in this boat of life that is a fisherman's toil.  Beneath my skin as I lie, I am a skandha, a complex, of these nets that have seen the waters of the ocean and their life.  That life, all getting along more or less, but you take a slide, like those idiots who drop a bomb into the archipelago to see what fish live their by assessing and noting, but here, in this case, such a time-honored method, like the old dinghy like long boat good from here to Arran island, or rocky isle, those old nets of rope or twine tied into squares and smaller geometry, to then be tightened as they round the creatures free in their cold clear medium of water.   That's me, the writer, lying there, more or less defeated, or caught, but still breathing as tiny infant eels wiggle somewhere within.  A friend of the seal and all the kelp and things that take to rock and live in tide or depth in worlds obscure to us.  Electricity, the minute lightning and thunder that happens down there beneath that gray or green surface, inky, cold, as it must be off the West Coast of Ireland, or Maine, supportive rocks.    In metal form, as in airplanes, or bigger ships, it only increases the tragedy of simple lives, makes burst for an instant the old back and forth of the tide and the bravery of man, woman and child and houses and families.  The plane will, like the curragh, bring you back, in metal, catafalque, and you will to be that mystery of skin, outer husk of all you know of you, your face, and down through each layer of the seawater wet net-like wrappings, each one, not all neat, down to core.

There are the words in all of this.  Like the nets, they are very old, and as fisherman talk to fish and all creatures of the deep, there's the older way of talking, Shakespeare, John Clare, anyone who gets the guttural, as if we could still make up words, and still could hear them as we spoke them and they intoned in some deeper wooden part attached to jowl, jaw, tooth, lip, tongue, throat, collar, heart, clavicle, lung, while the old brain watches on like an owl silent in the dark wood.

Breathing, I feel the ribs expand of these wrapped coils of old hemp woven, those nets that give a dignity to sea and creatures swim.


My job, I always thought, was to be creative.  But I rest now, pulled up, nothing but wild, dripping...

When you become a writer, you become another thing, another animal, quite different, that lone beast you always protected, from childhood holding bear or doggie, friend of the cats that would come to you.  You stand, autonomous, wild, a creature in some habitat, hiding in the herd, a whale in depths.


Time and thoughts, they come from chewing, as we would, not from labors impressed upon us, the squeezers.

No comments: