Doldrums

Seth,

Travellers in the desert, external or internal, are supposed to return laden with gifts, but I've got nothing. In fact I admit, the past four months have been a period of, not accumulation so much as loss. Not even tangible loss, which might be put to good use, but the slippery loss of footing and focus that you get, for example, from napping too long. Or too late. Imagine a four hour nap, unpremeditated, slipped into gradually and without warning, the cushions deep and cool, the fan on your eyelids, your socks off, everything. Dreamless; but then suddenly you wake up and it's seven-thirty. What the fuck do you do now? You can't go to back to sleep; but at the same time you can't really do anything productive, central. You've wasted both your energy and your exhaustion, and the result is like being a coin trapped on the wrong side of someone's coat lining. You just rattle around in there, not really doing anything.

I'm wondering how you deal with these periods. In the olden days, if Celestial Navigations wasn't lying to me, ships travelling through certain parts of the Pacific Ocean used to carry horses with them onboard. They fed them, rubbed their legs down at night. Treated them like passengers, practically, trying to keep their strength up. Then, when the ship hit a certain particularly-windless spot, they'd tether the horses to the front of the ship and have them literally pull it towards the wind. Cheers! Celebration! After they were out there was no need to keep wasting food and manpower, and the horses were cut.

What is ballast? Your boy Rimbaud liked to talk about seasons - not literal ones, though those work too. Pushkin wrote best in the fall: spring, and then summer after summer he'd spend gambling, flirting, *wasting*; but when fall came teh fetters fell and he worked. Another dream of art: that, by the genius of your good hair-days, your bad hair-days will be transformed into periods of fermentation. You were only "experimenting," only trying out that particular reverse mohawk; meanwhile a masterpiece slept in you like a kidney that you would eventually sell on the black market, and for thousands of dollars.

Sounds good...but then, that's a Writing way to look at it, right? And this right here, thank God, is definitely Not-Writing. It's a machine, with umbrellas sticking off of it and shopping-cart wheels and chicken legs stuck to the bottom - a machine whose purpose, for me at least, is not flight so much as non-flight: a sloth so absolute that it will the reveal the apparently-stationary universe to be moving very, very fast.

It's right there on the masthead after all (maybe we ARE on a ship): writing as a diversion to writing. Or, what to do in the great green doldrum that all of us dilettantes, aspirers, flaneurs, shit-eaters share. This is a constantly-interesting mystery to me. It's where I live right now for all intents and purposes.

(Another possibility of course is that this is the absolute WORST way to think about it, and that writing, creating, really means fessing up to reality and understanding that some things are beyond your control. Reality means being pragmatic, which I like in theory but can never seem to get myself to do when confronted with the page. I fear (and when I say fear, I mean it: I am really terrified by this) that what's really going on here is: the doldrums are finite, but I've refused to bring horses. I lack the necessary cruelty, the "killer instinct." Or, I simply do not want to arrive and find out that where I've been headed for is just as complicated and depressing as where I come from.)

Seth, you are a survivor, a seasoned marksman. You can take down a bear at twelve paces or wait calmly for it to take its shot. You eat cherries out of your hat, toss the pits at its feet. And of course, life can't take that pressure and misses every time. It's a matador-level readiness that I aspire to but frankly am congenitally resistant to. But maybe our weaknesses really are our gifts, and the things we prepare for life on the big stage only larger versions of what we've rehearsed in private all our lives. Wish I knew.

Hit me, Audubon. Let's see what you've bagged over the last four months.