the habit of being

A plain white sheet of paper with words typed across it (filling the page, plain black letters, small) is truly the loveliest, most inspiring thing. Before the first sentences are read and comprehended, the page contains all the most insightful, logically poetic, time shattering thought imaginable. The potential for all manner of beauty is packed into those black letters, spaces between, words yet unread, so neatly blocked off between one-inch margins on all sides. A page full of grammatical errors and trite redundancies, with no intellectual or emotional merit whatsoever even, is still indescribably engaging -before- it is read, sitting on a marble coffee table somewhere or tucked safely into a labeled manilla folder. Is it that a body of writing not yet titled is at once Anna Karenina, the Bible, and The Cat in the Hat? A body of text has life, it speaks to those around, calling them to read it, like magnetic poetry, words shout to be touched. Judgment comes about not until they are massaged, digested. Prior to that, the text may as well be sacred script. I must wonder if all people might simply assume that a hefty stack of typed pages must contain ideas, thought, truisms.

If anything in these years I’ve made things online I’ve learned that the web is entirely unlike print, and that one is silly who makes websites based on magazine spreads or such things. Still there is so much technical knowledge involved in actually using the web as the medium it was meant to be, I wonder if it is not better to simply put my black bits of text on a white page and hope that somewhere there is someone who might want to print it out. Online, plain black (#000000) text on a white (#ffffff) background is boring and plain. People want TV.

. . .

“You missed a nail.”

“Nah, the paint chipped off.”

“Now all the other girls will talk about you behind your back.”

. . .

Red-silver are my fingernails and pink are my hands tonight. It is now, this microscopic instant on my private sphere, as if my heart itself (my very center, more likely my brain than my heart, but I am sentimental and feel the beat strongly) were letting out a much-needed sigh and singing an aria all at once. I don’t often take notice of my sides, they are only products of engineering, precisely holding the rest of my body together, relatively straight, yet now I see my sides are quite exhausted. A slight tremor is still about, a trill on low F# (sharp), and it is in my sides that the echo seems to remain, bouncing back and forth like a neon vending machine rubber ball. In this after-feeling are all words and none, this is the paradigm of calm, much like what I once called floating. A breath means infinitely more (it truly does reach the entire body), a touch could send a crack down my spine, expanding somehow along all my capillaries until my body were as crazed as a dismantled clock.

To be truly aware, so far on the edge, one must be still, so still. (The slightest twitch might alter the trajectory of millions of tiny waves jumping about in my space. How many tangent lines does a human body create and break every second, with each pulse? Could one conceivably calculate the mean derivative of an orgasm?)

It strikes me that this flavor of reality is so close to that which follows and dreadful argument, or an eruption of tears, all is in turmoil, out of balance, and suddenly it is over, and for once one can really, clearly, think. It is this identical calm, only more dull, slower in coming, legato. I could never write even the simplest essay for school unless I got horribly upset about it first. Not until I’d had my mental entropy explosion time could I get myself composed enough to write, because afterward this detachment would step in and organize my thoughts in front of me, where I could see them for what they were, logically and in light.

Yes, this was true for years, until this term when I had to let it go due to the insane number of essays I’m expected to write (my body, my sanity, just couldn’t take it, the buildup to the calm).

Perhaps there is only a very limited number of ways a person can feel. In my case, there may be only two