Peripheral Vision: A Short Journey in Poetic Prose
In this post:
Distractions, outrage, and cut flowers.
Sometimes I write poetic prose. The thing with this type of writing is that it can mean a lot or nothing; it can be beautiful or just a weird string of words put together haphazardly. Meaning and beauty are created with the audience. But isn’t that always the case with all forms of art?
I have been thinking, what am I if I am not what I always was? This is a blog post that I was thinking of writing yesterday but time passed, and now the idea seems stupid and empty. I had my central idea and my secondary ideas; I also had some references. Everything seemed OK, well organized, ready for action, but the day passed and nothing was written. The idea is still incubating, maybe at some point it might seem necessary and interesting to pursue again. Or maybe not. Some ideas just escape, not the memory but the immediacy, and then there is no reason to explore them anymore. Other things come, distractions come, dinner needs to be prepared and other thoughts to be considered.
“If you cut it, there will be no flowers.” That’s what I told them this morning. I am on a quest for flowers. At some point one has to accept that some flowers will never be, that something must be lost which doesn’t mean that all will be lost, just something, sometimes, a good chunk. Bye, lost; I remain without you.
Read it, it’s not going to kill you, it’s not going to take forever, not even any significant amount of your time. You might discover something unexpected, something that you knew without knowing, without making it verbal in you mind. A truth without words, nonetheless true. And then life doesn’t change at all, it is not transcendental but it transcends you because it shifts your angle and then you start seeing things that were there all the time but you didn’t pay attention to because they were in the last corner of your peripheral vision. A shift that makes reality magical because it reveals the visible that had been ignored, for it to come into the light and make manifest the better person that you already are. Or maybe you refuse to become a better person anyway; but that is your business, not mine, I have my own refusals to attend to.
Outrage is like a mouth sore, it bothers you but you find an annoying pleasure on prodding it with your tongue. And the more you prod, the more impatient for it to heal you become, but prodding doesn’t bring healing. Most times, in spite of your prodding tongue, the sore heals. You can be distracted by other things until it comes back. But what action beyond prodding can prodding a sore bring? I wonder and I wish that I could know and if I ever find out I promise to share this knowledge with you all. I could bet a million dollars that the answer is lying somewhere just outside of our collective peripheral vision.