on behalf of me

"The professed motive of my solitude is to speak to loads of people." -- Edward Hoagland

I'm here because I'm trying to commit to the idea that writing is incremental. Like a pile of bricks that need some muscle and some patience and some spirit to cement together. Someone has to take the time to put one brick on top of the other. Rushing it ruins it. Your mind runs too fast with words you forget the moment you mumble them in your in head. The bricklaying is the way to pace it. Got that idea from Stephen King. Or maybe John Carpenter. I forget. (Writers of scary novels with suspense-thriller plots are disciplined. In that they are scary.) Me? I enjoy too much the fleeting sound of words I find myself mumbling. I pen them on paper and they look different, taste weird, did I really say those things and why.

Place one brick on top of the other, spoon soggy cement over one line of aligned bricks. Structures, plots, they don't work for me. So I worry about them later. The house, the story, will look whatever it will look when it takes form. I can tear it down later and start again later. I just don't want that oppressive idea of needing a plot before you can write a story. I usually have that vaguene idea of what I want tucked in my mind somewhere. Faith is what I have. Faith in a moody recluse in me who writes feverishly about things and images he loves. Nevermind the plot. I will provide the plot, after the moody one is exhausted with laying the bricks.

(But that is not entirely true. He, the moody one, doesn't align bricks like an engineer with a plan and a schedule. He's more like a potter running after a dream in his mind.)

Which brings me to the point. I am not the one really writing. I am just the cleaning lady. I pick up and clean up and dust off and chisel the rough edges. I am again, this morning, as I have years ago, giving up on the idea that I am a singular person, whole and unified, aware and conscious of all that goes down in my head. (I keep coming back to that mentally healthy whole peson idea just to feign 20th century lunacy.) Well, this is the last time. The "I" is a council.

This morning, the one committing to the idea of bricklaying as writing, is just the spokesperson. The others are vastly more poetic, but they are just oh so shy.