Sunlight Fills the Kitchen

New morning. I wake up with a need to rewrite yesterday's post about what writing is - or at least write a correction for it, lest somebody think I think I know what I'm doing - and so forget to feed the horses. What compounds, what conceals, what concerns us. Chrisoula notes I'm working by light of the Christmas tree, which we so rarely remember to turn on this year, and her saying so feels like an opening of some kind, an invitation to dialogue or to one of our skillful hot couplings in the pantry, and so I flee upstairs, coffee in one hand, writing in the other. For Christ's sake, not this again. Or thank Christ, this again? You see, the point is not to avoid the pathology but to go deeply into it, using whatever language facilitates the going, and not worry about what it looks like after. Let go of everything, including outcomes, but especially let go of the emphasis on letting go. Safe in the upstairs bedroom (she always makes the bed, knowing it's easier for me to write in uncluttered spaces), fluorescent pink mare's tails float slowly in from the west and hover over Main Street which is dusted with snow and not yet marred by tire tracks. We who insist on perfection and also on marring perfection - who have yet to conceive of creativity outside that tired binary - are prone to infidelity. It's okay but there are alternatives (living is inflorescence). On the far side of yet another failed attempt to persuade the muse to leave the projected role I make for her and enter my bed (throwing back blankets, messing sheets, dampening everything, marring it), I realize that somebody somewhere knows something I don't about the role of symbols and right pathology and it's not who I think it is. Want it to be? Well, shared errors are okay too I guess. I stay with the text until it's a question of this word or that, then go back downstairs for breakfast. The family is there, pancakes are there, hot tea is there. It's late but not too late; sunlight fills the kitchen. "Did you finish?" Chrisoula asks and for once I can say honestly "I'm not sure but I'm ready to stop and eat."