Inspired by the prose poems I’ve been reading, I’ve decided to try my hand at free association writing – or something approaching that. This, for me, is yet another attempt at ceding control; another attempt at trying to tap into the raw material of the present moment; another attempt to break down the barriers between thinking, doing, and self-editing. Based on my first two attempts, it won’t be completely free. The thinking is still very much crafted and curated. Perhaps I can call it semi-free association or free-ish association. I have a thought, I follow it a bit which leads to a tangentially related thought, which I follow and so on and so on.
While I’m tempted to, I don’t know if I’ll share these exercises like I did in the daily fifty-two project. I also don’t know if I have the discipline and fortitude to do this on a daily basis. Because people have encouraged me to submit more of my work for publication, I am, on occasion, deluded enough to think that something I write might one day be publishable. I’m hesitant to share because some journals won’t publish things that have been “published” on a blog… and then there’s the issue of not wanting to feed more content to our soon-to-be AI overlords.
All of that said, I’ll share yesterday’s and today’s attempts. These are “cleaned up,” by which I mean I fiddled with them when I typed them up. For the most part, I’m ok with that type of editing – editing after the fact. What I hope to do is to learn to pay more attention to how much editing I do as I work through the generative process… how many times do I pause to get clarity on the thought or direction? I suspect unfettered writing is impossible. I suspect the best we can do is approach it with varying degrees of fidelity.
Yesterday’s attempt was inspired by a series of color poems written by Mary Ruefle. In her series, each poem begins with a statement about a color of sadness, “Red sadness is the secret one” or “Gray sadness is the sadness of paper clips and rubber bands, of rain and squirrels and chewing gum, ointments and unguents and movie theaters.” In a note at the end of her book Ruefle writes, “In each of the color pieces, if you substitute the word happiness for the word sadness, nothing changes.” I liked this idea of words standing in for each other and colors representing other things.
3/28/24
If blue is cold and red is hot, what’s the color of boredom? Can I really say a blue wind swept in from the west? Last night’s butternut squash soup was too red, I had to let it periwinkle down a bit. I once got in a fight with a kid at bible school, or maybe it was kindergarten, or the babysitter’s house. His name was Blue Hinkle and I teased him by calling Blue Hinkle Periwinkle over and over and over again until we started scrapping. The phrasing had a melody my child mind couldn’t pass up. I can’t be sure if this story is true. My memory has gone taupe with shades of umber. Yesterday my memory was the color of Spanish tiles lining the steps to an elegant home, but sitting here by the water on this duck blue day wishing the sun would come out and raspberry things up a bit, my memory might as well be rust. Someone once told me that the human eye can see a million colors. Someone else told me that there are roughly one-hundred and seventy-thousand words in the English language and so I’m thinking why not use colors instead of words… except, now I’m wondering which of those million colors don’t have names. What can exist without a name?
Today’s attempt was more about being certain and declarative with what I see and hear and the doubts that creep in once we allow for the changes that time imposes on all things (from origin to demise). Most everything we see, as it is now, came from something else and is in the process of becoming something else.
3/29/24
In the graying dawn on a cool day at the end of March I feel the need to name and describe things. The breeze blowing through the open window is swift, the rev and hum of a motorcycle, distant. Today I want to get down to brass tacks. Today I want to simplify my language. Today, I declare I will be more declarative and name everything I see and hear. Blue mug, plane roar, shivering magnolia leaf, waxy and green. But language is, or can be, more complicated than that. I could also have said vessel, machine, organic material. I could also have said future shards, spare parts rusting in the desert, compost not yet in the pile. In this, there seems to be a bigger truth that defies the simplicity of declarative language. Everything has an origin and an eventual demise. Before the person working in the member services department for the local NPR station submitted the order for 500 clear, blue mugs engraved with the name of their most popular show, there was sand, soda, lime, and dye. Before the bolts and rivets and engines and seats, there was bauxite and iron, carbon and oil. I didn’t expect this lesson, but with my coffee growing cold, I’m learning a thing or two about time and its impact on perception – which is how I came to understand that when you wake and I say, “good morning, love, how’d you sleep?” I’m really asking about all those years before, I’m really wondering about the times when we’re apart. And when you say like a rock, I’m wondering if it’s bauxite or coal, or the turquoise I see glinting in your eyes which reminds me of a clear, blue, glass mug that will one day no longer be a mug because of all the breaking.