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Scratching pictures of wild creatures onto the walls of caves for future generations wasn’t exactly an option for me. Scroll keeping wasn’t my choice M.O. I wasn’t the one raising my hand when the proctor of life called for storytellers. Yet I am here breathing, jotting notes on whatever dry surface will have it. Staring into a notebook, staring into a monitor, an eight by eleven skin flap of tree bark. In grade school the sides of my palms were smeared with grey lead. In college, excerpt ideas and plot transitions rattled my mind crazed.
And still I ask myself-
What is it about the natural beauty of a woman that calls for words? Why does the warmth of a full moon dim need to be described in such a way?
While birds collect pieces of brightly colored garbage, for nest construction, to appease the opposite sex. While cats drag in dead rodents to express owner affection. While children color abstract crayon stick figures for the smile of a loving parent, I am using adjectives for female flattery, I am dabbling in a deep routed analysis of the world around me subject to Christ’s appraisal.
And yet I can still picture the books burning in the future, the digital screens that will put an end to these medieval utensils. It is not paranoia that warns me of such a bleak future, it is the current state of literature. That which cannot be commercialized and profited from will be stuffed away and forgotten.
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Thank your writing-
I was sleeping on a train with a marble covered notebook in my lap. A collection of notebook paper binding letters together, my only companion. They say that God is ubiquitous, having the ability to exist everywhere at once. The only other entity, thus far, that has matched such a quality in my eyes is the faculty of literature, which describes the otherwise indescribable.
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Frame of reference-
The paper is clear acetate, the words are color die, concepts and impressions are light, my hands are the shutter, which captures illumination, and my mind holds the shutter’s release.
My hands are the lure, my mind is a deck boat, and the right words are the Saltwater Snook.
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“Josh is in his own little world, leave him be.” My mother defended me during long drives. I sat staring out car windows, ascribing adjectives to the rows of pine trees.
Later down the line-
“What are you talking about……. paint jugs?” She asked mortified.
“I am simply making an analogy,” I replied.
She looked at me with contempt, “does everything deserve a God Damned Analogy!”
And so it was, I was lost in a world of syllables; I was drowning in a pool of prose.
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Where the page begins-
I have opened many doors in my life, walked many avenues. At the age of twenty-four my age in years matched the jobs I’d worked. The breaths I’d take in one day to counter the miles that flipped across the odometer. But the words that I can brush together may never counter the thoughts just one day hold. Thoughts run frenzies, they draw a bull’s eye on my ceiling; stare here, as I lay struggling for sleep. The same scuffle waged to put together an idiom worth the read.