Beginnings

First Substack post, originally published August 13, 2023.

There is a beginning to this somewhere, a point where it wasn’t and then simply was.

All beginnings may be like this.

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I try to think of how to start, of how to find a way forward. I try to remember what beginning feels like and just how difficult it seems to be when I am here and you are there, how great the space between us really is, a distance nothing can measure, a distance of time and place, of moments that appear and disappear before we notice they were ever here at all.

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It begins with a word, which is like a first gasp of breath forced out of a newborn baby by a slap on its bottom and, like a child once born, it cannot be erased for even erasure leaves its own trace. Some roughness of being always remains on the surface where it was once written, then erased. It becomes an abrasion.

I can blot it out with a drop of ink or cross it off the page. I can try to hide it in the deep well of forgetfulness and pretend that it is forgotten until it returns, as it always does, like a criminal who returns to the scene of a crime disguised as an onlooker.

Sooner or later, it must be dealt with.

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Perhaps this starts with a thought, a feeling, a tingling of nerves playing themselves out in waves that wash from the top of the head to the tips of the feet? Is it like a hand passing over a smooth surface until it hits a bump or snag then stops to explore why it’s there and what it means?

Do I smooth out the bump like taking sandpaper to a knot in a board?

Do I cut the snag and hope it doesn’t unravel to reveal a hole into which everything will disappear?

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A beginning can be a tricky thing. When we set out to do such and such, we might say we are at the beginning of something, but even at the very outset, even when we have accomplished little or nothing of what we have set ourselves to do, even then we have already passed the beginning, admittedly in only some small, vague measure, but what is the world, what is life, but the creeping on of so many small, vague measures that grow upon themselves until they become something else, not necessarily larger than themselves, simply different?

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I am waiting for something, but I do not yet know what that something is or how and when it will arrive. I am annoyed with the waiting, always waiting. I live constantly with the not-knowing, with uncertainty, and the waiting.

Will it come today? How will I know? How will I recognize it?

Is it something I can see or is it just a feeling, a premonition?

Has it come already, and I missed it.

It is quite possible I missed it.

Tomorrow, then?

Or the day after?

Now, I can see words as they begin their journey across the page, leaving a trail of where they’ve been, a record of arrivals and departures, of destinations previously met and of each forgotten farewell etched in the inky blackness of words whose secrets cry out from the white of the page that hides below.

Words can be mysterious things.

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We know words. We know the alphabet and it is a finite thing.

You can count the number of letters in the alphabet and determine a beginning, a middle, and an end. Yet between the first and final letters, each alphabet traps us in an infinity of words, words with the power to create worlds, with the power to describe destinations, both real and imaginary, words that create our religions and our philosophies, and yet, one day we have a thought, or we experience a feeling, and we find our alphabet can construct no words to express it.

Can the alphabet tell us what the word “love” looks like from the inside?

Can the alphabet tell us what old age sounds like?

Can a word—any word—give voice to silence?

Does silence have a vocabulary?

If I write, “The silence swelled as the sun set,” what do I mean and is it true?

If darkness falls, from when does it fall?

Do we really know anything about our vocabulary?

Is the nighttime darkness blue or black or does it wash over us in communal grey making shadows of everything it touches?

If we can’t get to meaning through the words, maybe we can get there through the sentence or through the paragraph or through the page or the chapter or the book itself?

What is it that is being said?

Who is saying it?

For whom is it being said?

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I have nothing but a pen here and a deep silence that lives inside of me, awesome, cavernous, still as a catacomb packed with the bones of the dead, bones that would tell you stories if they could only speak but they cannot, so I will speak for them.

I will write words with the silence that lives inside me.

Listen closely and the silence will write your name.

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Thank You!

PS: Readers wishing to support this work financially may do so by purchasing my book, An Assembly of Words, available on Amazon and eBay. A second collection of poetry, Not Emptied But Altered, will be available soon.