In the middle of reading Ranciere this afternoon, the realization struck me that I need to write. I’m not sure about what, or how, really, just that my brain is itching as though a little fly is walking across its ticklish surface and something needs to be done to alleviate it. But what, exactly? My mind is flittering about, though that may be an effect of the coffee, the coffee forever in my blood, more caffeine than haemoglobin at this point probably. So what does this mean? Perhaps this is all of the blogging that I haven’t done this year exploding out of me at once, or my ability to finally focus on things (it would seem), or just Adderall being a wonder drug, but I haven’t crashed yet like most bipolar people do so maybe the psychiatrist was right about AD(H)D. Who knows what that is, though, really? It’s so trendy to diagnose these days that it’s hard to determine whether it’s a disorder as widespread as it is, or whether it’s trendy and catch-most. Hm.
Gah! I had such wonderful sentences and phrases floating around in my head until I got up here and started to actually release them. This has been a chronic problem of mine for who knows how long; there are beautiful, poetic vines branching over the stone fortress of my brain, peeking their green leaves and roots everywhere, the picture of the academy, but when I try to write them down, summer suddenly turns to autumn and they all fall off, they fall off and I dance around and try to catch them in the air but they mostly slip through my fingers — some of them are caught, caught before they hit the ground and disappear into the other piles of old crunchy thought fragments, and I ply them into their original shape and paint them green and try to stick them back up but it’s not quite the same, so instead they are given the choice: go, rest forever with your ivy cohorts, or perhaps stay in my hair for the day and fall out somewhere on the path never to be found again, or be stuck up on my wall to be observed but never truly understood.
And eventually, these crumbled ideas, with their reds and yellows and browns and oranges, will pepper the off-white parchment paint of my dormitory walls, a child’s thanksgiving fingerpainting in its color scheme and relative incoherence, but one day, maybe if I collect enough of them, a framework will start to appear. A framework of a story, perhaps, or an essay, or maybe even of a new tree, one memorialized forever through those old crunchy leaves. They won’t just be on the wall of my dorm, but the wall of my brain. In this world, the apparently real one, the one where my brain is telling the muscles and ligaments in my fingers to move to represent neural firings like gunshots, here these thought-leaves are old and brown and starting to decompose in the world of the tangible, perhaps leaving crispy fragments of cellulose scattered over the academic war-zone of my desk, torn with bombshells of old papers, the pages of old books like leaves themselves, scraps of assignments symbolizing the lost, the dead, the ideas that could have been so grand and marvellous but instead lost their potential halfway through failed like old treaties. But in the other world, perhaps ever more real, they grow and thrive between the cracks of mortar. They become green again and branch together, grafting thoughts and words and cells and becoming that complex web that you could take a pen and trace around and around and find an infinite number of connections between, they don’t fall here. Where they were stuck to the wall in a random aesthetic array of dead leaves, here they persist and continue to change, grow larger and more beautiful. Perhaps.
For the time being, at least, I’m not sure where I am in that process. Certainly, there are no leaves physically attached to my wall, for there simply is no room amidst the shelves of pots and pans and books, the posters and tapestries and representations that I am, in fact, only eighteen. And maybe this is even symbolic that I am living that life for now, but what is to become of it later? Eventually, those posters must be taken down, hopefully not ripping in the process or leaving adhesive behind on the wall for the summer paint crew to take care of. At some point, those walls will be bare again. But will they be for my own creation, or for the next occupant? Will somebody else stick up their leaves and strings? Perhaps I’ll move on to a different room, a new room, and go foraging through the piles again before the horticulture crew comes and shreds them to little bits to create mulch for next year’s vegetation. Surely there are now those buds flourishing, and the painful irony here is that now, now when I am finally inspired, the words are coming as they sound between my ears and are not just my fingers twitching at random with visual syllables that don’t feel quite right, I must go and pursue another academic venture, one that has no relation to this thread whatsoever. And at this point, those leaves will stagnate, will be caught in in-between time, perhaps to be preserved or perhaps to see their season come and descend.
