Is writing urgent or is it casual? Is it a job, something to work at? Is it meant to come off easily? Is editing necessary? Is money necessary, when money isn’t immediately necessary? How is writing supposed to cope with money? How am I supposed to cope with life without writing? I can answer that last one. I’m not supposed to. So here we are, late morning in May, and I’m writing. And if you’re reading, I suppose we are some kind of we. But perhaps it’s a one-way we. Perhaps I’m doing this in a cave that I’ll never come out of. And I’m feeling disconnected from the world, and so this writing, if it accidentally blows out of the cave, is like an autopsy hundreds of years in the future, when the funeral director has the entire contents of the brain on video, and everyone is watching the mortuary video editor’s clips of my life. But here’s the thing. That video and these sheets, even if they were extracted straight from the physical brain-space or if they blew out when I wasn’t expecting to do anything but use them as kindling for my next cave-fire, won’t really tell you what the reality is.
The Reality. The One Reality to Rule them All. It’s a movie as long as The Return of the King and it ends even later than that one. It’s a metaphor in a cliché sandwich, it’s a truth made of the bricks of falsehood, a house that will certainly blow down when the big, bad wolf sneezes. And by the stubble on my chinny chin chin, I’m hanging on to the idea that there is a way to fit into myself, to become some “self”. To love myself and everyone else well and have the books written by me and about me to prove it. To get air quality monitors on every front porch and eliminate cars and factories and live forever with healthy lungs around everyone else whose lungs are also super healthy. To make money without working for companies. To make money at all. And yet, when I read things that resonate (and when I’ve written for long enough), I remember. I remember that there is not One. That the many don’t require evolutionary fitness to be among. That my life is a shadow of an instant of a sunspot of a spark of a dot on a speck, and it’s so much more and less than that. And that I might be a butterfly, dreaming that I’m a man. Will I be sad if I wake up?
No, I think I will then migrate to where I am called. But I think I am dreaming and awake at the same time. And that the butterfly and I can be friends without being the same. And I think my dreamy abstractions will sometimes become more concrete, sometimes flow like a river, and sometimes evaporate into a precipitative cycle, raining down after condensing in the sky. I may not drink another cup of coffee, but I will probably eat a sandwich. Fuel for the dreams, for the migration. And perhaps I will migrate to the edge of the lake, hang my hammock, and write.
I read the writing of other writers and I wonder I do not write with enough personality, personally enough, or using sufficient names to help people (and myself) hang onto the things that I’m writing. I like vagueness. The concrete feels like it can fall upon the heads of people that might be named. And I do not prefer the cliché of the writer who lost their friends and family by naming them, judging them implicitly, and laying them out on the table at the book signing. I have not the right to sign my name upon the names of the people I am and have been close to. I may still do so, but I will try to be obscure. Obscurity is a great kindness, I believe. When I am most obscure with myself, I feel that I understand myself best. For I am obviously not one thing, even if one could take a snapshot of my brain at a given moment, analyze it, crunch the numbers, and predict all the possible futures and their probabilities. I may write an entire dictionary, defining things in my own terms, and I will be like that library full of monkey, banging on typewriters the word banana, hoping that one day, in exchange for re-creating the Library of Congress, bananas will come out of the typewriters. I don’t believe the universe, the world, nature, the Way, or the logical construction project of Bertie Russell can be analyzed in terms of exchanges. There is no market determining the price of the word banana written on a typewriter by a monkey. There is a banana tree. One specific tree, somewhere in a forest, of a particularly variety, currently making a banana with the unbelievably excessive sunlight that need not be competed for. And should a monkey eat that banana, or should it be put in a box, put in another box, and then shipped in a container, before arriving in the box that I buy groceries from and then making its way into my mouth, there shall not have been any exchange nor any competition. There will only be an excess of sun, and if I drink another cup of coffee, a banana in a toilet.
When I’m looking away from myself, when I realize I haven’t looked at myself in a mirror today, I wonder what my stubbly face looks like. For I haven’t shaved in several days. And I wonder if the stubble is coming in unevenly, carpeting my face with a lawn that must be mown. For if there are any rules of acquiring bananas, having a shaved or well-groomed face seems to be one of them. And a well-kept LinkedIn profile (though I don’t need to look in the mirror to know that I don’t have one of those right now). I don’t want to look in the beard mirror, but I will when I get this banana out of me. I don’t want to look in the professional mirror, but I probably will when I empty myself of the money that I have from when all I did was look into the professional mirror. But perhaps I will find another way before then. And perhaps this coffee shop will not have a mirror in its bathroom.
It’s not even the afternoon yet, on this day in the middle of May. It looks like it might rain, it looks like it might not. I can hear the shadow of my father on my heart. He walks much more softly now. His wonderfulness when he was alive was in large part owed to his unashamed walking not-so-softly. I appreciate his unashamedness, about dying, about living, about working. I sometimes feel as if I am wondering for him as well, as I write, wondering what is right, thinking about thoughts and then wondering about thought-making. But he wouldn’t have asked for anyone to wonder on his behalf. And so I’ll wonder about him, but not for him. And I’ll find my way into abstraction-abysses. And seek tangibility in my memories of him. Because it was too early. I wasn’t sure what he meant. I’m not sure what he means. But I do feel like I’m finding out, even though he’s gone. And as I wonder, I think I’ll find out what I mean when I think about him, and when I think about what it means to be a person who seems to have been caused by other people. And to not just be a self-conscious effect, but an end, a mind, a consciousness. To not just be a way of providing for other people or making more people or making peoples’ lives better. My dad saw some things simply and he had a lot of conviction. I see most things as complicated and I have very few convictions. But the degree to which a person defines themself according to the differences and similarities with another person, even if that person was their parent, is not an appropriate or full definition. Because I am convinced that it’s complicated. That life is not a series of explicable mechanisms. That making or earning bananas is not enough of a reason to do anything. That being outside is not an indictment of the inside. That my life isn’t an indictment of anything. And that it’s time for another cup of coffee and a sandwich.
Roman Ryan 