I keep starting new posts, and they get so big and out of control and problematic, and I’ve written myself into a corner and I can’t find my way back out and, OH!
It is the sheer amount of input. I’m overwhelmed, trying to make sense of natural disasters, a flood of articles sent my way about violence against women and children, and whether I still have the right to worry about the ongoing need to simply maintain my home against the encroachments of wind, water, and time. I note the horrible state of the roads around here, which have been left unrepaired for years, and ponder deferred maintenance in a wealthy state as a symptom of decline, part of our larger deficit to later generations. It also reminds me of my own leaky house, unplanted seeds, and the ubiquitous “check engine” light, which is now on in all three cars temporarily in my care. The disorder in the broader world is mirrored in my home, in my life, in my own experience of entropy, and I don’t know where to start in my defense against it.
Add to that an inability to turn away from the ongoing coverage of the nuclear fires, radiation releases, meltdowns (or not meltdowns – the exact story is still developing). This is not due to a turning away from the human suffering in the existing disaster (as one person suggested on my Twitter feed) but due to a desperate attempt to keep my mind around an ongoing slow-motion potential disaster, which was averted… No! It wasn’t! Yes! Maybe?! Is is a triumph of containment or the second biggest nuclear accident in history (probably both). What does it say that this story is playing out at all? What does it mean?
And thus is writing thwarted. Not writing, as in: the production of words on screen/page. But writing, as in: coherent narrative, finished product, story… meaning. Rage against entropy. 300 words on Despair, Virginia Woolf, and my own battle with depression, 650 on the presence of contaminants in our environment, and how we are made of the very stuff we eat and breathe (thus suggesting, perhaps, we should stop poisoning it). 20 lines on this, a snippet on that, captured, evanescent meaning, the stuff of dreams. Like star stuff. Like life. Slipping through my fingers like so much melted music…