Tuesday, January 19, 2010

About thoughts

Don't think they are abstract ideas we that take shape while we dream -- thoughts are desires, images, feelings... I don't want to write about the guy drooling in the bus, mouth open like a gaping hole, snorting like a pig, eyes half-closed as though afraid to be awakened. Did you ever hear that line "I am tired of living and scared of dying", living mid-way between doing and sluggish inertia, desire and numbness? Yes, that was the expression I saw in his face.

And it left a sensation, faintly creeping, something indescribably disturbing. Then there was the old woman lifting his head gently, and posing it on her shoulders -- and I thought of weightlessness lifting weight. Mothers could be brave and strong in the way they are fragile. Love to think about it.

But I can't know how to tell it to you. I mean what I saw and how I saw it, and I don't know if I could ever tell it in the way that you feel it the way I felt it, and see it in its lucidity. 

What I am trying to say, in a nutshell, is that all that constitutes my writings are the things you see also. You might have seen them from a different angle, but I have seen them in the way that makes me wince and shudder sometimes. I have seen them in the way that makes me dream and hope. I have also seen them in the way that makes my heart lurch and makes me queasy. I have heard colors, I have seen sounds, I have felt things in the darkness of their birth and in the light of their extinction... simple things, big things, things in which we are born and dream and hope and waste till only the essential is left of us. 

Thoughts are things that make me remember the ancient truth: fairy land is the sunny country of common sense.

No comments:

Post a Comment