Traveling, Without Time :: Joseph Robertson

One continent runs into another, in the synapses that draw a journey across the sky, through the cool and genuine imaginings of a life lived more fully, in the tense posture needed to counter the erosion of basic human tendencies...

one continent lifts up the antidote to another, the complement, the other shades of a life lived close to the source, a passion as much unwinding itself in the wind of circumstance as curling up into its own inevitable form, ever more real as it seeks out the perfect tone for the recognition of its whole musical scope...

I find myself fantasizing about a life I neither live now nor am likely to live, as about the possibility of being heard, being felt, even in the enigma of my own distance, even as I rebel and seek to penetrate, contemplate, comprehend and undo another's necessary and hard-won enigmatic elsewhere...

to be the writer, to be the resister, to be author and subject, to be the progenitor, to be the receiver, to be the signal, the strength of a way of thinking, to be the turbulence without tragedy and the evanescence of deep troubles, to be more and to be less, to get to the very core and to be uninvasive, apt, sage and surprising:

all these projects I seem to consciously pursue, to wait out the crashing tides, to keep head above water and do more than drift: to survive by invention, but by invention of great new microworlds that give and are felt as giving to those involved...

the norm, the stricture, the tease and the drip-drop of a talent unnamed, the emancipation or the giving form to something that is not as such so-so, the act of getting to the moment —which is not in itself passive— where the more is available and is lived and is given...

how to maintain the sage approach and serve and respect the hunger at the same time? must one take refuge in hunger and in loss, in order to keep sharp the instincts that bring sagacity? somehow, I come back to the problem of 'muddling through':

a sort of ever-ongoing mood-swing, having to face the fact that the optimum action and the moment of truth do not come with the way prepared, nor in a parallel and permissive vacuum, but that they come necessarily and always in the mix and muck of the here and now, the unbecoming tide of confusions...

I am traveling, with her, with you, with the whole cumbersome impossible experiment of consciousness, without time, without the elegance or the wisdom time affords itself, without the incalculable resources of the world of self-forming geographies and emotional overhaul, traveling, without time, given to the flux and flaxen-hued with the damp light of a night whose scent seems to come from far off in a distant winter...

WRITING & NAMING: the medicine of acquiring knowledge
Joseph Robertson

Language is that point of contact in the abstract, that plane where the intellectual life within us is enabled to assert itself as part of the overall experience of living. Language is that plane where the individual self is allowed repeated attempts at manifestation. What takes place in the process of writing, in the spilling of ink or the posting of digital characters, the slip toward defining a landscape, however brief, is the sanctification of an individual, and by extension of the human condition as such...

Not every person is a writer, by trade, nor should they be, but there is something about the act of writing that serves the writing individual as if it were a medicine for selfhood, a healing venture into clean waters. Especially so when its intent is to be expressive of secret regions of the mind or to lay out new experimental vessels for such expression. [Keep reading...]