My Geometry

I’ve deleted two posts trying to write this down.  I’ve had trouble concentrating late at night and I have trouble sleeping–though the latter’s nothing new.  I feel like I’ve successfully compartmentalized myself.  I feel like I’m in a Murakami novel.  I’ve put my heart and brain away in jars and I take them down from the shelf when I need them and when I don’t the rest of me may as well be in formaldehyde, too.  I’m driven, I’m dedicated.  I do exactly what is necessary to go out in the late afternoon and write a day’s worth or more.  I eat and sleep and I am careful to use my brain for nothing so it’s fresh for those five or six hours.  If you were to ask me to cobble these days back together I’d be hard pressed to say more.  My memories are disjointed, tangential.  If you cut up a dodecahedron–if you lay it out a certain way– it can look like a Rorschach, or a mechanical butterfly; only one pentagon touching more than one other pentagon.  That’s how I remember, lately.  There are long walks and long moments where I’m about to cry and the few hours of In the Valley of Elah in which I’m taut enough to sing like fencewire.

It’s not that I’m numb or disconnected.  I’m where I want to be, given my means.  This is what I wanted.  I come alive on the page and otherwise I’m not invested.  My heart rests.  But that’s not true.  Broken up into these pieces, there are phases, moments, quadrants, in which I literally shake.  I feel so strongly about some things these days.  I’m up against a wall with one part of my life and with the others I grab at the thin air.  I feel surrounded by absurdity, by irony, by things so abstract I can’t discern any meaning and I see people relishing in them.  I’ve been rededicating myself.  I found myself searching for a kind of morality in Ohio and here I see its opposition.  I know what not to be.  I know where I stand and I know what’s below me.  We all walk on the bones of the dead.  It’s not something I’ll forget.

My field of vision narrows.  My interests dwindle.  I love the writing I’m doing.  I’m trying to read Notes from the Underground and I struggle because it’s so self-indulgent.  If it’s not a story of sacrifice and toil I am repulsed.  This is my Metamorphosis, except I wake up in bed to find myself a bitter old man.  But it’s good that some people write about other things, about themselves like I am now, about tripe like “the boundary between public and private”.  If everyone wrote something of moral import I’d have a much harder time getting noticed.

I’m trying to become more moral.  To live the way I write.  It’s a code I believe, it’s just not something I’ve been able to follow yet.  I find myself becoming a little harder again.  I don’t blame God for anything anymore.  I find myself becoming more religious.  I’ve asked him for something twice, recently, and I won’t deny it was selfish.  But I haven’t been confronted with anything I wanted that deeply in so long.  Ten years.  He didn’t grant me my wish and neither did the stars, and what does that mean?  That the alternative is better, I hope.  Not that it’s His plan, and He had it ordained this way, but that the compromise is too costly.

I feel best when I’m my own master, and I feel better knowing there’s nothing to lay blame on but myself.  I’m taking that weight.  The weight of the future, of the distance.   I have an idea of what’s to come.  The end isn’t clear but the path is worth it.  She’s worth it.  She and California, the distance to and from, the miles to Ohio.  When we started talking she had a path of her own, a long trip, and she told me she’d be better for me for having taken it.  It’s coming true of me, too.  I want to wear my bootsoles thin walking to her.  And if she’s not there I can still say I’ve gone those thousands of miles.