Morning. Take a deep breath on words; words come, you breathe them out like mist from a warm mouth. Words, then, and one after another. You’ve strength enough to make a bridge from breath; a voice carries you. The strength of a voice and the rhythms that belongs to it – from where do they come, with their measure? From where the strength of rhythms that carry the voice and demand words of it?
The difficulty’s always the same: you have to find something to write; the voice wants words, even though it came before them. Even though it arrived only as the intimation of a structure, as the skeleton, say, of a boat, that was not yet seaworthy. A frame without words that needs them and is nothing without them.
Is it difficult? More difficult still the sense of being without it, that rhythm that rises words up like a swell. More difficult that lack of imperative, of forward movement, waiting for a voice but in lieu of it, remembering what it might have been but no longer able to go forward.
I think there is always something in me that is suspended in that way: something to be gathered up, swollen and arrived at by writing. And perhaps not even then. The ancients painted eyes on each side of the prow of their boats. Eyes looking forward at – what? At nothing, just forward, and with painted eyes that could not close.
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