Blues, reds

[j4]

Oh, I'm all quote marks and scratchy heat today, and I'm fed up with it. I want to pick a fight with somebody, just to get it all out of my system. It's all hormones and airlessness and apprehensiveness; jars of weeping to store under the stairs, all siphoned off. Buckets of waste, stagnant in the sun, and the sheer stifling futility of it all.

I've got this thing I'm writing in my head, and it's been kicking around in there so long that I'm afraid to write it down now in case it makes no sense. A bit of it slipped out onto a post-it note and somebody stood on it by accident; stood on it with words, I mean, but I can still see the footprint in my head. Take nothing. Leave nothing. Stop still for long enough and there won't even be one line of prints in the sand, the wind will blow them all away and leave nothing but the place where you stand, the place you have to start from. Everybody right now seems to be running away from everything, though, just as I'm trying to settle down; I feel like I'm drowning in the wave machine.

It's too hot for book reviews, but recently I've been reading In the Heart of the Country by J M Coetzee, which is a big fly-blown tangle of bitterness and futility, and you'd think it would be just exactly my mood; but the experience of reading it is like being badly constipated on the hottest weekend of the year. There's no particular bit I can point to and say that's why I'm not enjoying it, but after reading a page of it I just feel bloated with it; it doesn't go anywhere, it just sits there swelling in the heat. Accomplished, doubtless; but unpleasant. I haven't finished it yet; still straining.

Ah well, the summer's nearly over, isn't it, anyway.

Comments

a fan letter

[vinaigrettegirl.livejournal.com]

A bit of it slipped out onto a post-it note and somebody stood on it by accident; stood on it with words, I mean, but I can still see the footprint in my head.

Write about that footprint, perhaps; put the writing on a dartboard or the back fence, throw rocks at it, obliterate the footprint; and then write what you wanted to write in the first place. Just because someone else was too threatened by your writing to allow you to make a mistake (if it was one; mistakes don't actually *matter*, they're part of the creative process) doesn't mean their fear should be internalised by you. Their opinion is just an opinion, not a fact; and who the hell are they anyway, God? I doubt it.

I, for one, would love to read what you write about the footprint, even before reading what you end up writing further, if that presently partly-inchoate idea is allowed to come out into the light of day.

love,

A Constant Fan

Re: a fan letter

[j4.livejournal.com]

I don't think they were threatened by my writing, they just have big feet and step on things sometimes. ... Will try to write about it later.

Fan letters make me blush. I hope you don't mind if I squirrel it away in a big box somewhere and put the box back on top of the wardrobe, next to the empty suitcases.

(I carry too much around with me.)

baggage-free zone

[(Anonymous)]

No, no, *throw it away*, plenty more where that came from.

Re: baggage-free zone

[j4.livejournal.com]

I keep throwing stuff away, and stuff just comes back somehow. It's like I'm a magnet and no matter how hard I try to stay clean I get covered in a thin fuzz of iron filings. And it makes me even sadder to think, well, this is how bad things have got, that I'm so drowned in stuff that it feels like an achievement to throw something away.