September 10, 2019
When you started this project, several people asked if you were okay.
Yes.
Were you?
I think so. I was swinging up toward hypomania, and plowing heedlessly through nostalgia. Some of it was good, some of it was bad, but I don’t think that had much bearing on me starting the project.
Robin asked if you were okay. “I just want to make sure,” she said once. “You asked me to check in on you if you ever started talking about geese.”
Perhaps this has a similar feel to it. A similar scent of ritual, a similar flavor of mysticism, a similar sense of some other reality vignetting my vision.
lorxus asked if you were okay. “People normally write memoirs at the ends of their lives.”
Life is a series of beginnings and endings dovetailed messily together.
There is a final ending, though.
I don’t think I’m near that, despite what passive ideation might tell me. I’m not writing some drawn out farewell.
So, why are we talking, you and I? Where is this going?
We’re talking because this project, self indulgent as it is, is leading me to confront and process a lot of different things, which I’d call a net positive. We’re talking because how can I know what I think until I say — or write — it? We’re talking because I’ve got a lot on my mind.
This is going nowhere.
I don’t know whether to be proud or insulted by that.
Can you feel either?
Not my department. The metaphor is still useful.
Well, fair enough. I didn’t mean that idiom, anyway. This is going nowhere because it’s a project that needn’t have a direction.
It’s not a directed thing.
It is a river.
It is the movement of the tides.
It’s guided only by gravity and the lay of the land.
It is its own musica universalis.
It’s a conversation.
Conversations have direction.
Not all of them.
It’s one of those late-night conversations that go where they will, in which sometimes very little is said.
It is not a minded thing. It has no autonomy and yet has no guiding force. No sapient guiding force, at least.
It is a way. It is a path, and yet the path is not the walker.
This is going nowhere.
Maybe, but maybe that’s the point.