Thu, 19 May 2005

for all practical purposes
I can never become a great writer because I do not know the names for things. A woman walks into a room and I cannot tell you what she is wearing, beyond the vague description of the colors, and even then not specific, red kinda, maybe brown. The room she walks into has a specific look to it, an architectural form I should be able to identify but can’t, and there are sound from outside, traffic sounds, but the phrase “traffic sounds” barely means anything, it’s a shorthand for ambient noise, each imagined individual automobile blurred into a rumble. All of this provides context, ideally, and a proper writer would be able to cast eachof these details so as to set up the reader for what is to come: is this woman one of those eternally bruised midwest minimalism women who will probably go to the bar later and get knocked around by some guy and eventually move back in with her mom? Did she come to this room to build a bomb, to crack this earth like an egg? Will she float thre einches from the ground, pulling dust from the air so as to cover the windows and the undefined walls, blocking out the sound of the nondescript traffic, until the room becomes a kind of cave where she, suspended equidistant from every plane, will hide herself for years, the minds of those who would approach the outer door becoming befuddled, so that they forget why they came, walk away from the door, drive away to the places where they stage their lives before the captive audience of their families, only now they cannot help but think there was something they were supposed to do, some missing sense which deforms daydreams and conversations into guesses at the contents of the locked room, and one night they will awaken, unable to sleep, and drive for hours, trying to find the building, but the building hides from them now, and will hide from them for years, until the woman decides it is time to return to the public, ready to once again be seen, and all the people who waited for thismoment would stand outside the door, all the details of their lives written over with want and confusion, clean of the world and ready to do whatever was necessary to see the woman and wait for an answer, wait for a sign?
(12:24.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #