One of those (bursting) times . . .

Did you ever have one of those weird nights where all of a sudden your humanity is made apparent and the terror and wonder of this is simply too much to bear?  It's like this great freeing weight that's trying to crawl right through your chest and explode in energy and abandon.  You know that it won't last, but you've got to do something with all the feeling- it's going to leave as soon as you stop rejoicing or crying or wondering or loving or hoping or knowing.  Like a petulant child you're screaming in your head, "No!  I don't want to let it go! It's not fair! It's not fair!"  But there it goes, softly and quietly and disturbingly, particle by particle into the humid summer air that fills the room.

O, I haven't been connected to it for such a long time that my body can't handle it's onset, much less its departure!  It is the pain that a body seeks out and revels in with heartbreaking abandon, this wonder-feeling.  I'm sorry!  I'm sorry I haven't been there to feel you!  I'm sorry I haven't been there to let your presence be known to me and the people that I try to touch with my work. I'm sorry that I have done no work. I can't apologize and you don't even know what remorse is, you can't feel it because you are simple energy, The Good, The Mystery, The Grace.

I am having an epiphany, and now I see that I am a servant.  I am a servant of hope because I want to capture you in words, though no one has been able to yet.  Our valiant efforts just tell us that we are still alive and that in the end the effort is worth it because it shows others that there is something to reach for. This is what a religion should be.  It should be feeling connection instead of severing it. I don't know how to love this feeling yet because it is so shattering and wholesome.  Only I can forgive myself for letting it fall by the wayside for so long.
More coherence, after the jump.


I suppose I should explain myself. Earlier today I saw a wonderful film that struck a chord with me that seems to be reverberating all over my life.  What a mess.  I didn't expect that two hours later, I would be sitting at my computer and become overwhelmed by the wave of stuff that the stricken chord had displaced. I've been reading a despairing David Foster Wallace, along with mythology and philosophy, and a dose of wonder and hope a la Charles De Lint.  This was an interesting mix that, with the film and an unidentified yearning to be thankful, resulted in the mental and emotional vomit you see above.  This is me cleaning up the mess I've made and trying to make my own sense out of it.

There's this concept of "The Good" in the philosophy of Sophocles, which, in a nutshell, is that "stuff" you do, just to do it, to make life better for someone, almost on accident.  The Good is comprised of three things:  truth, beauty and justice.  Truth is simply the view of world as it is, and thinking about how you fit into the world, more than insignificant, less than all-knowing.  Justice is seeing and doing acts without regard to how what you are doing is going to help you.  Beauty is order, completion, wholeness, the Idea of perfection that fuels the drive toward the physical manifestation of perfection. See, we writers like this whole idea of disjointed wholeness, meaning that if we get as much of an experience, or a memory, or event, as we can then we are reaching toward the actuality of experience.  We find, in memory, perfect experience, and so, if we can get other people to feel the memory, if we can get them to feel close to the perfect experience that we know all too well in our "writer minds," then we are doing our job.  In this way, writers find a way to access The Good with their work, as do the artists of other mediums.  However, if we ignore the drive from The Good or don't recognize it and give ourselves over to it, then we have failed and we have faulted in our relationship.  The thing is, we don't realize what we have done until we've fucked everything all to hell, and then reconnect with The Good through some other means.  Which brings us to the present moment.

I realized that I hadn't acknowledged anything and was still trying to pull things out of thin air when I saw this moment that made me think.  It was a moment when one character passed on a big fat chunk of The Good to another; hope, love, kindness, joy, peace, maybe even a type of faith.  I realize that this type of moment happens often in the films that we see, but for some reason, this one hit a little pipe and sprung a giant leak for me.  I saw and felt The Good again, and I wish I had a better way to describe it, but I knew when I began writing that I wouldn't be able to write, type, maybe even think fast enough to get it all down.  That's why so much of art is painful, we can't put all of The Good in there to begin to give it justice, and once we've tried it's all we can do to explain ourselves afterward.  Keep trying though, keep trying.