#LogBook 7: No hiatus, no letting this fade

 This is the most important blog I’ve written so far.  For substance? No.  For pithy wit? No.  For foresight? No.  It is the most important blog because I’ve written and posted something.  Do you remember the ‘shiny new’ thing?  You know, when the shiny and new passes away, that thing?  Well its happened.  Gone.  No more.  I have been beavering away, honestly.  One post isn’t finished, it needs a bit more work, another is finished, drafted four times, yes four times, but might be for somewhere else, so no post here.  Anyhow, my target today is 100 words, aiming high, just get something done, no hiatus, no letting this fade away! There, we’ve done it, a post, a blow against apathy, and way beyond the 100 words!

#LogBook 6: Chaos wrought - Chaos Got

 Tuesday 26 January 2021

I have written some poems; I cannot think of myself as a poet; therefore I am not a poet.  Is this the opposite of self-actualisation, or is it just the negative form.  That’s not a great way to start a written piece of work, but it is accurate, but what is better the well crafted or the accurate . . . I don’t know, let’s move on!  Do I have a mental block?  I cannot, or is it that I will not, or should not, think of myself in this way.  Did you spot that?  I didn’t use the word.  And if you’re really sharp you’ll notice I didn’t do it when I mentioned I didn’t do it.  Mr Pressfield is that resistance?  What is a poet?  Does qualification come through quality and quantity and longevity; that is competence.  I do not know what makes a poet.  But I am someone who has written poems, am writing poems, not at the minute because I’m writing this, and if I’m writing this, which is about what makes someone a poet, or not for that matter, I not doing what poets do, but that doesn’t mean I’m saying I’m a poet, okay.  I’ve read a couple of them on the radio, but I have published none of them, that would appear strange, but within the dyslexic paradigm, the cursed side of the blessing, it is the obvious, the natural flow.  It is the victory of the spoken word over the written word.  General literacy is recent, hand written copies last century, the printing press last year, the internet yesterday, the written word is modern, the spoken word ancient.  

 

So back to the poems, I couldn’t find them.  I know where they are online, but I had printed them out, and I wanted the A4 sheets; it wasn’t that I wanted them I needed them; I could easily print them out again, you know CTRL P, but the originals would have notes, highlights, little changes, it was these that I wanted, that I needed.  Eventually I got them, in heaps of paper, lying on the floor, amongst the rubbish awaiting disposal.  The poems, many of which are the embodiment of ideas, emotions, and feelings.  The ethereal, the idea, the thought found a voice and was transformed into the tangible.  They were warfare, a battle of words, some of the hardest, yet easiest writing I’ve ever done, the ease was time, they came quickly, the battle was the acceptance of the idea.  Had the time come for their birth, or had the bravery come to find them, either way they were the culmination, the articulation, the embodiment, the ultimate end of creativity; of life.  The ethereal had taken on a true form, it must be expressed, but why should it be?  Is the answer to the question a commentary upon the individual, or the means of expression, or the act of creation, or the outcome, or that which had existed within the intellect now existing on paper?  Must these ideas be expressed?  Must they be given a voice that others can hear?  Are they the cry of the soul?  Joy or sorrow, exuberance or melancholy?  Yet they lay on the floor, in a heap of rubbish, waiting to be thrown out. 

 

It is the chaos of thought and metaphor, it is the inadequacy of words, the battle to grasp them, structure them, release them, yet here for me, they lie on the ground (literally) and must be searched for.  Chaos must be constrained, not stopped, or limited, but made busy in a fruitful state of being.  Chaos formed the thoughts, yet chaos (almost) lost the expression.  We do everything we can to make our homes safe, and then what do we do?  We light fires in them.  Fires at the heart of the home!  Fire is heat, and survival, and life, and the future.  Fire is chaos, it is danger, it is death, it is destruction.  But which is it?  It is what it is, and we know what it is through experience and observation.  The chaos is contained within a metal box, which sits upon a slab of stone, and then watched over by a smoke alarm.  Chaos is not tamed, chaos is mitigated.  Chaos is not removed, chaos is utilised. 

 

What is fire?  It is the heat, and the fuel, and the oxygen.  What is fire?  It is three, it is all, and if any be removed it is none.  When the triangle is broken it is gone.  When the triangle is unformed it shall never come to pass.  The elements are not chaos, the unity is chaos.  Yet the chaos within the metal box is nothing to the chaos out with.  Food is not chaos.  Diet is chaos?  Uncontrolled chaos is destruction, it is danger, it is death; the chaos of control or the chaos of intemperance; they are unity within disparity.  Therefore mitigate the chaos.  I could search through the chaos of the rubbish to find what I sought, and what I sought was the precious chaos of the intellect.  What will we abandoned to the chaos?  What chaos will we abandoned ourselves to?  And when we have done so, what will we find?  The chaos of creation or the chaos of destruction.