Reading and Writing...

The feeling of what it's like

Maybe you know the feeling. Maybe you know what it's like. To compose a life of scraps and fragments. To live in jumbled lines. Between stitches and tight sentences. In the texture of torn out paper, crumpled and dismayed. All our dead darlings, balled up on the floor.

This life of reading and writing, is a source of safety and concern. A calm worry. Solace and fear. The thing that strikes the match, makes a spark, lights the dark, and burns me alive.

Reading is like breathing. Maybe you know the feeling. Effortless and uncomplicated. An action without action. A striving without strain. A form of Wu Wei. Like water bending. A tree limb bowing to a breeze.

Writing is like epilepsy. Fits and spasms. Stops and starts. A series of convulsions. A neural pattern interrupted by an electrical charge. Anxiety punctuated by agony, punctuated by terror, punctuated by pause. A seizure and release. A pugilist at rest in pieces. An ache pushed against a uncomfortable place.

Maybe you know what it's like.

We look for a poetry in the disorder. The hope that in every sharp corner, in every swooping curve, in every wrong angle, in every unexpected turn, there is something complete. "The discipline of creation," Madeleine L' Engle says, "is an effort toward wholeness."

Maybe you know the feeling.

That everything ill-fitting, turns out to be a work of precision assembly. A marvel of engineering. A part of an interlocking all.

Reading has a way of finding us, of helping us finding parts of ourselves. Writing has a way of taking the pieces and turning us into something else.

Maybe you know the feeling. Maybe you know what it's like. Maybe...

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