Wednesday, July 07, 2004

The One that Got Away



If you write you know all about that feeling of being nothing but a conduit from some deeper, wider, more important place. Maybe you don't feel it often, but you do feel it sometimes, and then writing is more than pleasure, more than joy, something happening elsewhere yet everywhere. You look up from your work, and five hours have passed! Where did the time go?

The answer is that it didn't exist, because you were in an in-between place, out of time and out of space. You were nothing but a door through which the holy winds blow and everything you wrote down was perfect and nothing you wrote down was from you. It is a blessing to have these moments, worth of years of dental visits without novocaine and good beer.

This is what happened to me this morning, and I'm still weak at the knees. Then I erased it all, accidentally, and the sun died. It deserved to die, and I deserve to die and also to tell about it as publicly as possible. What I had on the screen is gone for ever, and this is because I was a clumsy oaf more in need of my decaf gallon than saving these sacred messages from Elsewhere. So. I hope you feel as bad as I do now. No, not really. Just wanted to share.