To write while empty. Strangely uneasy. I feel as if I have so much to say and yet lack the will or the patience, calm, to say it, to voice what lies behind the dam. An older man now, the experience is richer but the stamina to express it is weak like a lone leaf in the wind. The feeling, always dormant, intensified recently as I listened to a song from my youth. It was beautiful then, soaked up by the mass and momentum of all that captures a young man’s attention. There, in the fabric developing the net of what I only too stubbornly call my life, I welcomed its impact half consciously. Others, more conscious (let us say), solidified its beauty in their reception. They doubtless would recount a different story. Still, I’m entitled to mine. A relative beauty, I was not ready to participate in what it could mean for me. How sound melded together surfacing something absent and yet present in my youth, thanks to memory and current mood. (Grant me the courage to stave off the paradoxes!) I prod on.

I hear the song differently, I believe. It heightens or is heightened by the melancholy of what I could only take for granted. To what can I compare it? It is like the walls around me. I fully appreciate their function when stepping outside into the winter sun. Were they not there already in my underappreciated state? Yes and no. A strange feeling evokes a sense that earlier I stated I lacked. (I know the name clinicians would give it. Pray lay aside psychological conveniences for the moment.) The tension there, raw, between visceral exultation and destitute form, suspended cartoonishly in midair. I listen to different renditions, thanks to the miracle of the Internet. I listen, too, in the company of others, largely virtual, watching their reaction, further intensifying my feeling and love of the song. How wonderful, strange, scary, our social constitution! An enhanced experience through participation. Weird yet calming. Sharing presences richer sensibility.

Courage compromised by age. The energy of only a decade past is waning. Why should I disturb the waters? Let others more skillful lift the dam! (Clearly, metaphorizing much more than song is at work here.) Not only words, but courage! Will others not say it better? Does besting their efforts really matter? Is even raising this question meaningful? Let me bask in the undifferentiated calm of an element of youth created now. Allow the background foregrounded viscerally to remain formless. Nothing comes of the alternative! Strain! Anxiety! Jeers of craftier others! This, I suppose, is the temptation that this blog means to conquer, incidentally does conquer, if only meagerly; there it is again! I peer into myself vicariously ignited by genius. I retract under the weight of all that has been described. Let it be! Settle for this fortuitous experience of formless participation. Be happy for it!

But why write? Why write all this nonsense? As if from a distant place: the courage to word comes through wording. Wording is the beginning of courage for it. Sure, easier said than done! That unsettled feeling of feeling unsettled masks a blessing, then? The masochist in me, even in you perhaps, nods. But why the anguish? How to conquer this self-destructive tyranny? Habit. Simply write. Pray, meditate, if you are so moved. Evidently, I must (forgive the denominalization) word. But please, less painfully! Can it occur without feeling unsettled, without anguish? Is this not just another word for … death? Damn it!

In act form comes. QED.