It has been a while since I’ve been awake at this time—and even longer since I’ve written here.  I forget how much I miss this hour.

Sometimes, the most difficult thing to do is to say nothing at all, write nothing at all.  It’s being full of stories and withholding all of them, shoveling extraneous strands of words into an amorphous deathbed for sentences that didn’t quite fit or were too many.  It’s the feeling of knowing a secret—perhaps not precisely what that secret is, but rather, that impulsive, unshakable feeling that you know something that the rest of the world doesn’t.  It’s like watching shadows chase one another up the pavement, etching their freeform black shapes into your memory, then watching them turn formless as they melt into the darkness with the disappearance of the sun.

I write in spurts.  Not only is this how I apparently blog despite attempts to maintain some semblance of consistency, this is also how I write academic papers.  I begin, at first, bustling with ideas, ready to slap them onto a page.  And then I either open up Tumblr or Club Bing, and 3 hours later, I have one nicely constructed paragraph on which I spent a total of 10 minutes.  Moral of the story is that I would probably lead a much more interesting life had I no access to internet.  But then I would also not have 25,000 points in Club Bing, and I would seriously be missing out.  Life is tough.

Over the past month or so, I’ve gotten into the habit of reading daily poetry—which usually results in me reading days worth of poetry in one sitting to anticipate the many days I will not be reading poetry in the coming future.  And because I haven’t written much and lack the time to write something at the moment, but insist on posting something anyway as a form of procrastination, here’s a poem I particularly liked by Charles Barber.

Fairy Book Lines, by Charles Barber

Death be nimble –
life was quick
Efficiency’s a modern trope
To be expected
with impatience
Not less
when bearing death
Or a low-burning illness
slow as memory.

Though death’s old-fashioned
and enters the room
Like Sonnambula,
bearing a burning candlestick.

Double, double
toil and trouble;
Triple sadness,
endless sorrow:
Like friends sitting too long
by the hospital bed—
Like the T.V. watching you
with paralyzing glare;
While the night-nurses
in soft-soled shoes
Wheel in the confections
to ensure your misery
Will last a long tomorrow.

The world’s so full
of a number of things
Now never to be savored
Never to fire
a subordinate employee
Destroy a marriage
position an M1A1 tank
On desert children.
Marveling at such achievements
is a sure way
To gladly sacrifice
a number of things
The world has always favored.

Poor old Charlie,
he swallowed a fly;
The fly was drunk
with M.A.I.
Buzzed here buzzed there
Till a well-seasoned fever
stitched in hues
Of delirium-like gold,
cooked in a broth
Of bacterium stock,
festering with forgotten dreams,
Took hold—took him—took life.

Twinkle twinkle
eyes in pain;
Retinitis makes
its awful gain.
Eyesight’s a form of breathing
–like glass
Full and rich with freedom.
Now a bag
slides over the head
too bad!
So long to the world
So long desired:
darkness sucks you down its drain.

Fly away, fly away
over the sea,
Sun-loving sick boy,
for summer is done.

First the pneumonia,
canceling the lung,
Followed by a possible list
of viral, bacterial, parasitical,
And let us not forget fungal.

The slow-covering growth,
so like nature,
Slowly returning the body to earth,
adrift in underground.

“One of the earliest lessons I learned as a child was that if you looked away from something, it might not be there when you looked back.” — John Edgar Wideman

When everything else has left my brain—the memory of your tilted smile, the year Obama was elected to office, the name of every human bone and nerve—what I hope is left is my memory of seeing: the way of seeing with such profuse clarity that the entire world glistens, that every word becomes infused with such intensity; the way I learned to see the world when I turned 21.

I know the day is coming, the day old age robs me of my memory and my heart can do no more than palpitate weakly inside a cage of wrinkled flesh. I know that there will be a day my breathing shortens, when my heels can no longer sustain the weight of my frame and my vision shuts out color.

I shy not at this inevitability because I take comfort in knowing that, vision gone as it may be, I will still see—see in a way that no physical impairment, no hazy shapes or dysfunctional rod or cone, can replace. I will still see the way the city lights poured into the dark, rolling hills of Berkeley at 12 am the night we crept up to the mountain perch with flashlights and blankets. I will see gold and orange houses blaze against a violet sky at sunset and plumes of grey offsetting the jagged outline of treetops. There will be rivers etched into rocks, snaking down a field of wormwood and sagebrush, and wet, brick pavement beneath a pale green arch. In the winter, there will be snow melting into dirty water, and all of this, I will see.

I will see these things because when I turned 21, I learned to see the world this way—a series of specifics and drawn-out details. At 21, I read an essay on the ways of seeing, and I was transfixed. Suddenly, contemplating the Hegelian dialect seemed far less interesting than the physicality of the world around me. Everything became a story, some heart-stopping transition. I wanted to write because writing forced me to pay attention, to examine the tiny movements of hairs on an arm or study the way a leaf crinkled under a boot. The world became better. Is it possible to ever tire of this?

Some days are better than others. Some days, everything around me is brilliant, and writing is easy. Other days, I probe through dust for stories, but only turn up mothballs for sentences.

But I like to write because the world gives me reasons to write. I write to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what it means. In the 1800s, Tennyson wrote of the dilemma faced by artists, writers and musicians: that creating work about the world often inhibits an ability to enjoy it by just living in it. True as that can be, I think writing, for me, is sight re-gifted, a remedy for the dull. I should do it more often.