(fr)action

He arrives home brimming with the uncommunicated, the unexpressed, a whole day’s crowding and accumulation of sensations, impressions, events. They’ve been sliding in and out of clarity, arriving, departing, sometimes leaving no trace but a vague itch at the back of the mind. He can now remember maybe 10% of it all, and yet this would be enough to keep him up all night writing - sifting, teasing, organizing, connecting, expanding, rediscovering. This process, too, while absent anything that might be called “event”, is saturated with impressions, sensations, deductions, revelations - for each remembered article of the day’s inner phenomena, he can conjure a web of interconnected notions, and really, can’t a man live just one day, then spend a decade writing about it without repeating himself? Nor does he feel any particular urge to be selective or discerning. He will write until he feels himself going dull, his mind growing opaque, and accept the limitations of his vision and memory, the unconscious whims of his inevitably, humanly selective mind. The notion of a final analysis! Of an omniscience observing and recording the infinite minutiae of a lifetime, of a day - an infinity made incomprehensibly tedious by being finite - is laughable. Some super-computer up in the clouds, mile-high databanks blinking and churning! Life is lived fully, but only a fraction of it consciously - this consciousness is what we are in the world, where our processing heads and hearts rise above the sea of data. He arrives home brimming, shrugs out of satchel and coat, pulls off his sweater, wrenches open his laptop, then stands still in the middle of his room. The day begins to creep back into him, he stands absolutely still and silent. The fancies, notions, words, sentences, characters, tragedies, puns, revelations, banalities, turns of cleverness, turns of poetry, exclamations, denunciations, associations, memories, ambitions, curiosities, cringes, elations - everything inches tentatively out from the dark corners of his mind. Creeping, creeping into the light. 10% - OK. Let’s get to work.