Dear English Teacher,
Late nights and cheap coffee, manic mind steadied by fluid fingers, speakers turned down low with timeless tunes echoing through the empty room, harsh screen glare glinting in lonesome arrogance off smudged lenses and blurring cornea—all this is my writing. I somehow always write in a darkness. Whatever be my physical environment—a bustling coffeehouse sidewalk assailed by Cole Porter on a caw-cawing spring morn with air tinged by the empurposed exhaust of human self-compulsion, or a sinking-to-rest tree trunk amidst lichen-traced stones frequented not-all-that-frequently by some squirrel or dryad theredrawn by that inquenchable hiss of subliminal vivacity demarking virgin Nature—there is some far recess of my mind, some niche fully within, to which I pull myself to write.
It is an overwhelming place, for sight be gone but nowhere else can befall a man such sensory substance! Strange spid’ry snippets of an idea scurry down arms or sinist’rly suggest subtle blasphemies ‘gainst my idea of Reality. It is really quite ironic, that I approach this door confident of my mastery of language, only to be mastered by the truths breeding within. In moments I am strapped in a still subservience to the force of all that of which I am just now becoming aware. I do not structure, I neither command nor contrive—I translate and interpret the natural lines of differentiation, I let flow by a spontaneity of comprehension and relation which I have diligently carved into myself.
All of my initial manuscripts have already undergone several draftings. A writing is its content—which is how Homer is as relevant and valid today as Faulkner, despite changes of language and style. Each of all I have written is only some vivisection of the unified Great Idea of Life. The moments of recording are actually quite inconsequential, no more than a few snips and examinations of something deeper that I have been cultivating within that room. Indeed, if my writings—if any writings—are to be worth the merest dirt clod, they must have their roots lain æons prior to their articulation. The whole of Writing is appropriately an entire mode of life. I am not a compartmentalized being—perception ever exists and channels things into that room.
It must be understood, and I confess: I suspect that this room is a sanctuary of the subconscious. Every entrance thereinto calls communion with my fundamental form, each familiar encountered once within is some curious but hitherto un-realized suspicion of reality. My ventures are but times of realization and documentation of what has already developed.
But the room is not ego-centric—it is anthropo-centric. It grows within my fundamental humanity. As I have read, studied, heard, listened, watched, experienced: bits of others’ fundamental humanity have drifted in and settled. And as these bits of humanity have surfaced to consciousness, I’ve noticed a comprehensive cosmic conversation encapsulating humanity throughout time. I can hear movements and periods and even individuals discussing that Great Idea of Life.
At each séance within that room, I yet merely scamper about the feet of these passionate phantoms, tentatively offering meagre recordings of myself but listening mainly. I still await the fullness of experience to surge into that room, for my mental grounding to reach sufficiently into antiquity. But I have resolved to contribute. I occasionally hear scrapings of that great beast formed by these inquisitors just outside the room, and I fancy that someday I might flow into it as well, that I should escape these dimensional bonds of location, time, and paradigm. It is the only heaven and eternity of which I can currently conceive—perhaps old age will address this, but for now this is the hope of my driving youthful ambition.
So around and from these fantastic inner musings and mappings grows my life. Writing is not so much something I do but something which is so involved that it inherently gives my life form and purpose. It is how I conceive a reality and consider it as something unified and coherent rather than as something disjunct along human divisions. It is that which drives me beyond.
Completely,
…
-=-raptur-=-
