How I’m Writing Today: Palimpsest
Here’s your close reading.
These days nearly all these posts grow out of a much larger manuscript I’m working on. It’s as I were on a teeter-totter: falling with the gravitas of this larger work but then buoyed by the thought of breaking my indulgent thoughts and sentences into smaller pieces and stripping away language. Or this: pushing forward with the larger more difficult manuscript opens windows and doors in passing that frame tantalizing ideas that turn into posts.
Someone I recently read mentioned the notion of a palimpsest: an old manuscript that was erased and rewritten, because the parchment itself was valuable and endured. Modern techniques have allowed for the reading of the words that were erased.
Maybe the palimpsest is not that different with how we are with each other: our rewritten and redacted conversations help catalyze thoughts, actions and intentions with each other. Completely tangential words have the capacity to present a new and quite fruitful direction. Or waste lots of time.
Diversions present. I give chase. It’s neither a tidy nor effectual way of writing. And yet, the result is a fortuitous amount of blasting that clears away the surface…crap…and bores down toward the issue. Sometimes.
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Image credit: gifmovie via 2headedsnake
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