Scratching the itch

postponing the premonitory urge

seeking the angle of repose

We want to “fit in” — our intersubjective urge leads us to find (maybe sometimes invent) shared qualities with those around us.  We sing together, hymns, anthems of our age, anything…

Most nights (during my mid-sleep-cycle awake time) and mornings,  I groom my previous day’s notes. Often there is a premonitory urge, a trying to scratch the obsessive Tourette’s itch of solving the mystery, of wringing a bit more order from chaos, and of damping down (more likely postponing) the urge before it intrudes on my keeping faith with public commitments (such as grading papers).  Sometimes it’s like a haunting melody that I can hear in my head but not express out loud. IF I could outwardly express my innermost thoughts, I feel there would be a resonant harmony that would approach the stillpoint–be enormously–even transcendentally–gratifying… something that had the scent of the eternal.   (some strokes leave the patient thinking clearly, but unable to express themselves (expressive aphasia) — somehow recalls  Cassandra who could express herself but never be believed)

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So I search–like the poet Franz Wright (as Langdon Hammer (2006) put it) “as if there were a word just out of reach, beyond the words on the page. He calls that goal   /  some radiantly obvious thing I need to say, though quite what that might be escapes me at the moment, as it always has, and always will.”   And somehow that word is the lynch-pin, the keystone, the single drop of sand that triggers the cascade that  restores the stillpoint of all the aggregated particles (thoughts, feelings)–an angle of repose… WHAT is the unrecovered word that would precipitate a cascade?  There is always the possibiity that the lost word is THE word… a tipping point, like the LOGOS that engendered the universe–the word from which all words flow (and seek to return? –sounds like … Sefirot)