Today I purchased a writer’s magazine. Terrific. Also, I’ve been thinking about writing. Wonderful. But the act of writing seems only to exist in the hinterlands of my intentions. Okay, so I’ve put up a few blog posts. This is unimpressive. And by my reckoning a “writer” would have been past Skeptic by now, having polished the hell out of it. After all, it’s not War and Peace, right? I mean, that’s what writers do, isn’t it. They write. Compose. Scribble. Draft. Finish. Complete. End.

Let me peremptorily re-direct these musings to say this isn’t a post about writerly self-flagellation. Rather, the heart of the matter is a question of intention. How motivated am I to write? I am. And is this blog “the” place or “a” place for my writing? I don’t know. Further distillation of the issue becomes a matter of time. How much can I give to the blog if I move into more serious projects? I’m not certain, but I’m unquestionably getting an urge to jump into something bigger. Strangely, as I write this it has the feel of an impending break-up. “Jephnol, you know I love you…I mean, you’ve been a part of my life for a long time now, but…it’s not you, it’s me. I just…I feel like I need some time. You know… I mean…look I don’t want to hurt you. Seriously, this will be good for you, too.”

Here are the things I do like about maintaining a creative writing blog: The format is interesting because everything is so condensed; I can move from project to project and play with any aspect of storytelling that interests me; It’s almost free; and I have a readership (I love to be read). The downside: Time. That’s all I have…that’s where I am.

Posted late last night…was close to bedtime when I decided to write something…anything. I liked the idea, but the whole don’t-post-first-drafts thing came back to haunt me. Must post warnings over push-button publishing failures to fend off guilt associated live-doc rewrites.

WARNING: This is a first draft. It sucks on many levels.

It’s an old house. It was built in the 18th century so it comes with a lot of history and fair number of drafts and creaks. It’s a perfect setting for a ghost story. Living alone in the place has given me the chance to explore that twilight between life and death, if only in the most ordinary ways. To play with the theme I once read Henry James’ Turn of the Screw by candlelight in the dead of night. I’ve also taken a more modern approach, watching ghost stories on DVD in the middle of the night. It can get a little scary, but a truly hair-raising event happened some years ago, when a young woman I was seeing followed me into the cellar of the house. Notably, she was a practicing New England witch, giving some credibility to her immediate reaction to that dark space. She wrapped her arms around herself and said, “Someone died here…someone’s buried here. I’m leaving now.” She would never again set foot in that part of the house.

The more mundane aspect of this story is the utter normal flow of life in my home. Nothing moves about by itself. There are no inexplicable bumps or moans emanating from dark corners of unoccupied rooms. Nothing. Until a few nights back. It was the middle of the night and I was having a dream as I slept in my bed. I was standing in an old place, with rough-hewn beams laced with cobwebs. Before me there was a door and as I stood watching it opened by itself into an unlit room that seemed to have no end. Surprisingly, I felt no fear, only curiosity accompanied by shivers running from my head to my toes. As I peered into the dark space I began to wake from my sleep, still conscious of the dream, and heard high-pitched scraping and thumps coming from another room on the same floor as my bedroom. Could there be a supernatural being in this place as my friend so long ago suggested?

In the morning I investigated the corner of the house, from which the noises originated. My snapping turtle had woken from his deep hibernation and as usual was getting rather active. He had moved two large rocks across the bottom of his tank, from one end to the other. I had found the source of the ghostly emanations! The mystery was solved.

Then last night as I lay in bed, in that space just between the light and the darkness of sleep, I heard the scrapes and thumps again. It occurred to me that I should have removed the rocks if he was going to be making a lot of noise. After making a mental note to take them out in the morning I shut my eyes again to go to sleep. There was another, louder thump. It seemed closer than the others, so alarming that I sat up. Then I saw her. She was standing near the door to the cellar looking down at the floor. Her back was turned towards me, her shoulders were slumped and heaving as though she were crying. She turned violently and looked at me…through me. Her eyes were open wide as though unbridled madness had rendered her incapable of blinking. Her mouth began to open and the room went dark. I’ve never experienced such darkness. There was the sound of moaning and a sharp scraping noise, a door slammed and then something pounded a wall in the cellar so hard it shook the house. Then it was quiet. The dim illumination of a street light came back into the room through a window, and in the background I heard my turtle pushing his rocks across the bottom of his tank. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to sleep in this place again.

Is this thing on?

Writing Casual gave me conniption fits. There was a concept somewhere in the mix, but it was lost early in the process and never resurfaced. Often creative posts go their own way. Such was the case here. The original idea was to write about seducing my inner-writer, that is to say, getting myself in the mood to write. A strange notion about my muse slipped into the narrative and the cross-pollination of ideas shot me off on a tangent. It became a conflict of sorts and ground my usual pace to a crawl, the whole post was tied into a knot and, no kidding, I couldn’t untie it. It wasn’t until this evening when I asked myself just what I was married to in the damned thing that I couldn’t delete or re-write in a workable fashion. As frustrating as all of this sounds though, I consider it a part of the process of experimentation and play. More, more, more….

The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric arrived in the mail today. Written by Sister Miriam Joseph, it’s an explication of the core subjects of the liberal arts. Very exciting!

A shadow thrown by morning light reaches across the room and onto the farthest wall. She kneels on the mattress, arching her back, raising her arms towards the ceiling, stretching the sleep from her body. She touches his face and leans forward to kiss him. Her lips, barely parted, loose, inquisitively responsive, brush against his own. Taking him in her arms, she places her cheek against his chest and closes her eyes. He smells like shaving cream and soap. She inhales deeply, as if trying to pull the scent into her memory, and pauses before she draws another breath. For a moment her expression darkens as she contemplates the betrayal she’s committed in his arms, then she presses her face against his skin to smell his scent again. Laughing, she kisses his neck, his face and his lips. She knows she needs to let him go, but not yet.

After he’s gone to work she wanders through his apartment looking at the little bits and pieces of his life. They make her smile. She drinks a cup of coffee while she browses his book shelves, then takes a shower, dresses, and collects her things to go. Looking at her phone to see if there are any missed calls, she begins to plan her day. Her husband will be home this evening and there are things to do before she sees him.

A recent response to an email, the subject of which had been the topic of two separate conversations, resulted in some wire crossing. Reminded of a incident where his wife tapped the nose of my snapping-turtle with her finger, a friend emailed a link to an article about a turtle and made the comment, “That is not my turtle.” He was quoting something I had posted pertaining to his wife’s turtle nose-tapping some time back. I wrote back, “It’s turtles all the way down.” There’s no doubt this left him somewhat perplexed; it was a misdirected response to the previously mentioned second conversation. After the muddle was sorted out he seemed to be curious as to the nature of the second conversation as well as how I came to be so certain about the cosmological significance of turtles. How could it be that I knew so much about turtles and creation but couldn’t understand numeric inversions (an obviously less daunting arena of intellectual endeavor). I responded to his questioning:

The formula is a numeric inversion of the Laplace Transform. The argument as whole is a nod to Euler who, in a challenge to Diderot, was said to have posited, a+b^n/n == x, donc Dieu existe…. This construction could be re-framed, stating: Algebra, therefore God exists. Not knowing algebra, Diderot fled the scene in terror.

I have not heard back from my friend.

Addendum:

It’s important to note I know nothing of the Laplace Transform beyond the above transcription. I am studying math, but at a level that most third-graders would feel comfortable with, as evidenced by my recent, jubilant embrace of a proof for the Pythagorean Theorem:

In my tender youth a supposed teacher instructed my class to memorize a book, after which we would then “know” math. She underestimated my stubborn streak…I never opened the book again. Sadly, after all these years, it turns out I like math.

If you stare at the wall long enough you begin to see moving patterns. You might think, “It’s just a white wall.” But they’re there…you’ll see them if you keep looking.

“What have you been doing? We’re going to be late.”

There are mystical qualities to nothingness, just as the simplicity of an unadorned, white wall is an illusion.

“And you’re not dressed!”

There’s energy in everything. It’s in the wall. It’s in the paint. If you try to you can feel it.

“Are you even listening?”

You can feel it in your hands…in your face…your whole body…

“You’re sleeping?! Hey…hey, are you alright?”

…like a vibration moving through your whole being…

“Oh, my God! No…no…oh, please, no….”

…as if in one moment, the light from all the stars in the night sky was coursing through you.

A friend looked at the (previously posted then deleted) self-snaps and made some noise…liked the damned things. I am a rudderless vessel, steered by command of the wind and currents. Thusly, I re-post…please see below for details.