Silence

This is mostly from my journal today.

May 3, 2009

Now in less than two months I will be on a trip with Julia through Italy and hopefully writing down the experience all the way. I have put a stay on any writing for a while as I have been experiencing many extraordinary things my life has been handing me. This is also convenient for someone whose natural state errs toward sloth when there isn't a fire under my butt, a blade above my head, a carrot on a string, or any number of motivational tactics based in fear, aversion, desire, or craving. It has also been hard to write because of my love for artifice in language, which I so often confuse for excellence or beauty or truth. Most of my writing I have taken very seriously is accompanied by the thesaurus, bricklike in my sea of thoughts as I try to express myself; I have tried to take my thoughts and stretch them onto a grander, more gilt framework. I have been going through a writers version of analysis paralysis, some call it writers' block, but I treat it more as a shedding of old habits that weigh me down, give me fear of words like "content," "style," "legitemacy." Many of the experiences I have been living through urge me toward the truth, what I see before my eyes. My old love for inflated, make-up painted words like tarted up prostitutes is a lot of deception, and far from the truth.

I am now sitting in the same spot where I started looking for an appartment in Avignon. The cafe in front of the Utopia Cinema, same table, same chair, same sense of calm quiet in the shadow of the towering Popes' Palace. A little over half a year from the last time. I am quieter now than I was last time, no longer trying to read the thoughts of my lover and in the process completely losing control of my own. What I am coming to realize in many ways (intellectually, experientially) is that I had attached myself to a person, wise, if at times unpracticed in compassion, who rather than indulging in his own experience of my uncontrolled emotions and reactions to them, held up a mirror, perhaps to guard himself but nonetheless illuminating my own distressed and anguished mind. In this sort of awakening to my own self, it should be noted that last time I was here there were four others, I am here sitting alone now. I don't know if this marks a full or a partial revolution in some cycle but I feel (emotionally) that this is a significant moment, undisclosing its future issue or incarnation, but vibrating there, calmly, giving no direction, only asking to be felt.

Avignon has woken up. The air is getting hot even though the wind still blows and some days the hoards of tourists move like crowds of fall leaves, collecting in piles at the gelato stands or blown up into chairs on terrace cafes, but all purposeless moved about by the winds of their own whims. Tomorrow I return to the enfants and their handlers and I'm happy because I can scoot up to the lac de la barrage in the Alpilles and watch the reflection of the peaks in the still water, sit among the buzzing myriad insects, and write down what happens.