things and unthings (thought 15)
With reason enough, I’ve been thinking over writing more and more…as of late. Beyond my current state of endeavors and affairs, I guess the best I can do to attempt to ascertain from whence these thoughts derive (as it were) is to attribute them, at least in part, to my recent encounters with Salinger’s Seymour an Introduction and Hemingway’s On Writing. I guess the best one can do is to wrap oneself in it as much as if it were the only thing preventing an endless fall into the incredible abyss of existence. With or without a great deal of pomp and circumstance, I’d like to point out here an obvious correlation—if only so apparent to its even-more-obviously self-serving identifier—between such a net of pursuit, as to be the only thing separating its occupier from an insufferable nothingness, and this lowly soul’s very existence. One questions into what such incredible abyss this nothingness resumes. One wonders, too, how it is that he or she (or they?) came to be dangling from this thing in the first place and why such insistence on grasping its decaying fibers with a fist so unyielding as to have become entrenched within itself over a life of never letting go. It is as the mouse tells Teddy: “The tree is there to feel its own self fall.” The writer is just a tree in the woods—as is a cucumber, an attorney, a Volkswagen, and the very concept of time itself. Each thing and unthing is the hero of its own story. The reason for its own being. I might as well just chop off my ear right now if I’m ever going to make such an effort to contradict existence. What a fruitless pursuit I’m sure that would turn out to be.