Out There

The candlewhite, the slow tightening of the coils of the mind around -- something, anything -- hardly matters -- my mind runs not like a stream but like a pen on a napkin, back and forth, fretting its groove, returning again and again to thicken and widen its cartoon representations. Restlessly making the curves smooth and the lines straight. Obliterating the reality under the conception.

Of course, without flaws, there is no drawing; without the irregularity and startlement of what doesn't fit, nothing interesting would happen at all. Everything would collapse to a single straight line or a single circle. So we admit a little of it, a little awkwardness. But then the whole force of the mind scours away at it. It goes looking for it, but the first thing it tries to do is contain it, insulate it, domesticate it.

It's an interesting exercise, to go looking for the origins of the awkward and irregular. Not because of what we find, but because of what we don't find. It comes from -- vague wave of the hand -- out there.