An Introduction.

My hours are bracketed by silence that is, as Kierkegaard notices, the qualitative opposite of silence. My silence ends when I exorcise whatever has formed internally within that silence. I cannot picture opposites perfectly; I can only pronounce the imperfection of my memory. I try to define notions and colors in the thick of a stone-white cloud. I try to make out a landscape, to allow my breath to blow mists and fog from the forests and roads, so my eyes can apprehend the hillsides and the sun and the faces of the people moving about, so that I might find my way to them through the inward noise of experience. Behind all of that flows another channel of thought, one whose current laps at the bank of all my experiences, trying to pick and pull and carry away any little thing into the next inevitable silence.

I am nothing; my quantity is similar to that of sunlight reflecting off drops of moisture on the lace of a web strung between blades of grass in an isolated, untended field. I am spun by a spider into an infinitely fine web, at each cross-section the contact point becomes a word, and the slightest breeze tests my strength. My intuition and my intellect are those ultra-fine threads winding from word to word. Everything is filtered through; each second of the day is run through like a sieve held in a stream. I reach my hand and thought out to whatever sticks, trying to take hold of what the spider is not already gobbling up.

I am nothing, and how can nothing have an enemy? But I do have an enemy, and this is my fight against it. As the universe teaches, everything came from nothing. So the enemies of that which is nothing are all the forces that prevent it from becoming. I know that it is true, that something can come from nothing, because before I was born there was only an abyss, and then at the moment of my birth the world came into being. I am aware that for me to have been born there already had to be the world in which my mother existed. I’m not arguing against that, but that is her world, and this is mine, and our worlds, as all people’s, are as alien and as intimate to each other as the sun is to the sea. The sunlight hits the sea and shimmers, it moves in flux with the surface of the water. All of the opposites coming together on one thin surface of movement and experience, all the different elements of water, wind, and air, and all the animals in the depths and the sky that require all of it to exist, becomes a fine mesh that we absorb and sort, and that becomes our universe.

Because my thoughts are my own and your thoughts yours, because they comprise the lattice-work of our lives, and because the only commonality between us is language, I stare through a stone-white cloud and try to create a landscape on which we can meet. I try to stave off the enemies of becoming; I try to focus my energies on one goal, that is, to exist.

These writings will be the voices I remember, the images that form that I find worth saving from dissolution, the letters I write and receive that find no other proper place, sketches of faces, descriptions of walks, studies of bodies and buildings and moments, stray thoughts that have solidified into sentient feelings. These will all be products of silence.