Monday, January 17, 2011

An Essay


This whole blog is going to be an essay. Not that I mean everything I write will contain some sort of thesis or footnotes. I mean like the French "essai" or "attempt". Possibly also "ese" as in mexican homeboy but I'm undecided. My point is that all my ideas are works in progress and they will be for the rest of my life. I want to create, sometimes that means creating ideas, sometimes stories. At the moment I study theology which is a terribly complicated process but the hope is always there that I will emerge simpler on the other side. These stories are the simple output of a mind trying to uncomplicate itself. 

Let me give you a word picture. Think of a river. That river starts at the top of a hill and eventually pours into an interminable ocean. Water forever. Going back up the mountain we see that the path downward is not straight, there are knifebacks, large pools and waterfalls along the rivers course. Look closer and you will see that now even the body of the river is not simple. All along the waterway there are jutting boulders, half-dead trees leaning into the water and shallow parts where beds of pebbles cause the water to ripple over their surface. That river is what I see when I try to think about time. I mean the stuff of time, the 4th demension, the thing that makes me late. 

But where my mind really grabs onto the picture of the river isn't in the way it moves, turns back on itself or accelerates up and down; I'm fascinated by the things in the water. The world lives and unfolds in the river of time, and the events of history are the trees, boulders and pebbles. The shape of the rivers course and the objects in the river exist in a symbiotic relationship. Just as an idea from the 7th century that had a tremendous impact might be unrecognizable in its present day form, so to does a rock placed in the river look unrecognizable after the affects of erosion change its shape and leave particles scattered the length of the river. Conversely the river itself is now unrecognizable apart from the influences put upon it by the current changes created by that idea. English poetry first emerges in the 7th century and I could not picture a world without the influence it has wrought.


I guess that anyone who ever wants to write does it partly to unpack some of what they have in their head and partly to leave something to look back on.
Books, blogs and newspapers are snapshots of the mind, of an idea before the flow of time gets a hold of it. Authors only have their work to hold onto in a static form, after they let loose their creation into the world, they're just playing poohsticks.


Let's keep doing this....
Jesse