porch musing again

i had an imaginary conversation with a chair.  i can't remember what it was about now, but it struck me, right as i was making a really suave point, that i could have made that point to a real human being.  but now that i've already made it to a chair, i am most certain that i will never be able to fein the authenticity to make it to a human being without skipping a beat in my head when i realize that i've already imagined this point and feel obliged to recontextualize part-way through the performance.  i almost always think in complete verbalized sentences, spoken conversationally in my head, as if i'm talking to someone.  i hope this doesn't mean i'm neurotic or something but i think as long as i'm doing the talking its fine.  i wonder about the texture of other peoples thoughts.   do some people really think in pictures?  or in numbers?  i don't really have any way to relate to that.  

in one kind of cop out of a sense you could say that you can see how people think through art.  well i don't know about that.  i suppose some people can more accurately transcribe the texture of their thoughts but we can never directly convey them.  this strikes up biblical in my head.  things about removing the veil and gazing directly at god.  taboo.  burn your eyes out and singe your clothes kind of stuff.   the original texture of a thought not your own is the most divine apparition.  the texture of our own thoughts is so profane that we often ignore it, let it grow stagnant and tangled, only noticing when on occasion it flourishes in response to some artful representation.  some articulation so purely distilled, so close to its original texture, makes us think "yeah that's what i'm trying to say."  that seems to be a marker of quality.  for me at least.  do i react to something as if it could have come from my own mind?

after realizing my chair conversation, i looked out off the porch and thought that it should have its picture taken and put in a book about nice porches.  then i went inside and got my little notebook thinking how i needed to try keeping it on me at all times because some of the stuff i was thinking at the chair was pretty good.  then i sat down and tried to relax and sit as i was sitting before i'd had the ideas that i was explaining to the chair.  remembering to remind myself to write something about the whole chair incident, i picked up my notebook and wrote.

"i had an imaginary conversation

with a chair that i will never have

with a human being.

A remarkably calm day.

Things that fly 

like calm days.

Mosquitos by day and now

the birds.

Shiz sings lightly

to herself in her room.

I'm wondering what kind of journal 

Thomas Merton wrote in.

How big was it?

What was it made of?

What were it's colors?

The sun crowns behind a cloud

then melts,

dropping red behind the ocean.

One can get a sense of the earth's rotation

by staring at the sun

as it nears the uprushing horizon,

knowing that it is still and we

are moving."

 

...

i don't mean to imply, by any means, that this is a poem, because it isn't.  what it is is the transcription of an experiment in transcribing my thoughts as they come and go while i sit on the porch.  i'm going to have to run a lot more of these.  you think edison only ran one experiment before he put light into a bulb?

i will close with a true anecdote about thomas edison:

he once said,

"If you hustle while you wait you will succeed."

a monk later said,

"If you are forced to stand in one place for a few minutes, at least to not stand still.  Turn somersaults, cartwheels and handsprings... While waiting for that big appointment, ceaselessly climb up and down all over the furniture of the outer office... They will never forget you."