today is saturday.
en route to target, shopping with my wife... she made a comment, or rather, passed on a comment. she told me that my mom thought i was too proud. and then that led me to this rambling discourse about the anger that i held inside of me... anger, primarily at my brother. but also, anger at my mother for repeatedly entreating me to "kowtow" to him, in order to bring the family together... anger at my family for concealing the crime, the disgrace, and promoting a hypocrisy, or lie, that allows one (my brother) to live admired and respected, while my sister went to jail... the reversal of it all. how i hate it. even now, it makes my blood boil...
and it's killing me.
as in the car with my wife, i admitted, i don't know how to forgive. i don't think i want to. part of it's the fact that no one knows about it. everybody accepts the status quo. and i am supposed to keep the secret too (although i risk it every time i write in this blog)... the concealment is part of what causes that anger to seethe within me... it only grows and grows. it consumes everything. it fills me with tension, with restlessness...
i think, at times, that that is what keeps me from truth. but to get there is difficult. it means a kind of surrender that i'm not willing or able to commit to. i mean, i feel as though i've surrendered, and been humble all my life. and it leads only to more resentment and abuse...
of course, if i were thinking zen, then i would admit that i hadn't gone far enough. that i hadn't experienced the radical humbling that completely effaced and dissolved the self... but i am afraid. there, i feel, is the way of death. and it is through the gauntlet of more and more fracturing, more and more destruction of who i am. the monuments i have built to my self...
*****
i still imagine...
when all the doors are closed... what purpose is there to live?
i am hoping to push things, to stir things, to settle things... and thence, perhaps, to see the depths? the clear depths? the waters so clear you can see fathoms deep to the ancient buried drowned secrets? and the wonderment of who you are, of who i am?
those places, in dreams, that allow me to access the underwater worlds. i must visit and explore. and find out who i am...
*****
billy collins spoke about his writing process. like margaret atwood, he foregoes typing directly into the computer. i now understand why. while it may seem productive to be able to type fast, and delete all errors... like you are going directly to the final product... well, in doing that, you erase the entire process of writing. the mess of it.
yesterday, during the nanowrimo timed writing, i neglected to continue the "kappa noodle" story, which, to be honest, is snarling in on itself, and becoming unwieldy and complex... and basically just wrote a 30 minute bitch fest. i was complaining about a lot of things... also writing a lot of unsavory fantasies... it was really a bunch of trash. i am not sure what i intended with it. but it probably felt like the better thing to do than to try to confine my thoughts to a dead, inspire-less amalgamation of words...
believe in process, above all else.
*****
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