|
I keep a plain (unruled) Moleskine in my shirt pocket for pencil drawings. I also keep a folded sheet of paper there that acts as my weekly to-do list, grocery list, and catch-all list of instant recordings of ideas. I sometimes transfer these ideas to a 5" x 7" ruled pad that keep in the case that I carry my Sony Reader in. On this pad I try to record my brilliant (oh, yeah) thoughts which I will later have etched in gold leaf and stored in a platinum case inside a massive bomb shelter so that future species can behold my wisdom. Sometimes these are complete ideas but more usually they are quite incomplete and may only be a string of words, phrases, visions, etc. To me, they seem more appropriate for a psychoanalyst to delve into (or run from) than for anything else. This week, I was on the road, travelling (wading?) across Soaklahoma. I was listening to an audiobook of Hesse's Siddhartha. About mid-way through the book, when Siddhartha answers Kamaswami's question "What is it that you've learned, what're you able to do?" with "I can think. I can wait. I can fast.", I was at a rest stop and jotted this down:
Thoughtlets
Triflings. Vanities. Indulgences of mine mind.
"I once did think a thunk - thunk a think." <--author?
Trival triflings. Turmoil. Transcendent terror. Irridescent ideas. Idiocy.
Infinite iotas. Impassioned pleas for identity.
Monumental, meaningless, wallowing.
I once did picture pygmies - punctual and putrid.
They scattered my thoughts across the landscape.
They waylaid my hopes for serenity.
They tattered my woven ideals.
Groundswells of misdeeds oozed from below, contaminating all purity of being.
|