Thursday, January 15, 2009

fairy lights

i want to write something.

but i don't know what to write about. sometimes, i have these flashes of a profound thought or a clever phrase, but just as my mind begins to consciously examine the spark, it goes out. it's like it can only exist when i don't look directly at it, like a light in the dark. have you ever noticed that if you look up at the night sky, the brightest stars are never those in your direct vision, but the ones just radiating away from the center of your focus?

it keeps haunting me, the sound of a voice, a word, a vision out of the corner of my eye, just behind my left shoulder, but no matter how instantly i turn, i've always just missed it.

2 comments:

Andy White said...

Your post reminded me of the following passage from a book I read last year called "Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"

...At the lake we stop and stretch and mingle affably with the small crowd of tourists holding cameras and children yelling, "Don't go too close!" and see cars and campers with all different license plates, and see the Crater Lake with a feeling of "Well, there it is," just as the pictures show. I watch the other tourists, all of whom seem to have out-of-place looks too. I have no resentment at all this, just a feeling that it's all unreal and that the quality of the lake is smothered by the fact that it's so pointed to. You point to something as having quality and the quality tends to go away. Quality is what you see out of the corner of your eye, and so I look at the lake below but feel the peculiar quality from the chill, almost frigid sunlight behind me, and the almost motionless wind...

Agatha Wells said...

so maybe i should give that book a chance..lots of people talk about it, but i'd never thought of it as something i'd read. profound as always, andy!

it's not just for the classroom!