ROAMING AROUND

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writers’ musings:

“Language… You chat with family and friends, you attend to correspondence, you consult menus and shopping lists… then you enter your study, where language exists in quite another form as the stuff of patterned artifice.”

Martin Amis

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I’ve never felt like I’ve had writers block. I have at times cast about for what to write about of an evening, and then the pen starts moving. ‘The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on,’ says Omar Khayyam or someone equally mystical. The ACT of moving the pen across the page in the hieroglyphics of English, in my case, creates something, some content, that unspools the mind. Ditto with all the fingers flying over the keyboard like an Ouija Board. Something comes. The clay starts yielding. The fabric starts gathering. The canvas responds to the brushstroke. The tabula rasa incarnates ideas.

I’d love to write, love to LIVE as if there is no techno life, before Joyce ever was or certainly Williams Burroughs. After Shakespeare, though, because he had the words and since we’ve come aways, being closer to him would be closer to those riches, that great treasure-chest of language. Definitely before Freud who explained too much. Goethe was good – maybe writing along with Goethe would be where and when I would want to write… except he was too much the romantic, so maybe that wouldn’t work for me. Goethe cut through the romance but I might not have, so I think I would need to go back further – could I write as a believer? If I travel alongside Dante, God and bedevilment and Heaven and Hell are in the way. I know I prefer godliness to God.

It’s language, I think. Language that delivers the brilliance of coalescence. Language is simply a marvel. Yet in my view, like so much in my lifetime, language is devolving towards a poverty, considering the richness at its apex - which would probably be from the 16th through the 19th centuries. I know I’m being anglo-centric since English is all that I know. Words just aren’t being called upon or used in the same way, some developments are stimulants, hop-hop for instance …

I can say something to a stranger in a casual encounter and sometimes it’s as if it falls into the dead space between us of incomprehension.

Okay, what else can I stop at in my roamings? The audio book I’m listening to? It’s great: it’s called UNRAVELING by Peggy Orenstein. She’s a fine non-fiction writer who’s also a knitter, and decided to dive into the very source of the end-use of yarn. She found a ranch in Bolinas and got tutored into what it involves to shear a sheep. Sheep, by the way, MUST be sheared. An escaped merino lamb was found after a few years with NINETY POUNDS OF FLEECE on its body. Once sheared, that sheep was nevertheless emaciated, because it couldn’t graze properly with all its fleece in the way. Anyway, she sheared a sheep. It was unbelievably difficult. She washed and carded the wool. She spun it, she dyed it - processing it until it was ready for knitting. Along the way she laments the fact that 60 percent of what we wear, and of textiles in general, are now made of synthetics that are petroleum-based, and are subjecting the molecular world to microplastics in an unsustainable reality.

I keep roaming around. If I were to write as a modernist in a medieval world or a newly-rational world, I would be schizophrenic. THIS world, now, IS schizophrenic. I can barely handle it.

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Hard copies of DIARY OF OLDING, Vol. 3 are now available: all the SubStack postings from 2025. Volumes 1 & 2 are sold out. You can order direct: jma@thetrak.com $25 postage paid

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