non-proliferation & noctjournals

As I mentioned last week, there are 3 projects actually, actively open on my desk here.   I am cleaving to the wisdom of a friend who reminded me that sometimes the most strenuous work of a writer is to keep competing ideas properly contained (read: ignored) ... until it is their turn.

Right, I say - then there is the Journal.  Not just a daybook (though I have one, or 43, of those), but the journal of this Third Peripateo - my present wanderings in Greece.

I rented a car last week to widen my ambit -- thinking it clever to justify not-walking by calling it 'treading.'  As in 'tire-tread.'  Ha.  (cough)  I kept pretty good notes on the major events of this peregrination, but it had so many dazzling moments that at least half of them went unwritten, and have sifted through my memory.

Or lost the mooring of their context: such as the morning after a visit to an abandoned temple.   I had woken up three or four times in the night with the word Katabatikos resounding through me.   By the morning, the purpose of it was entirely gone, only the chitinous shell of its meaning (meteorology: 'downburst') left.

Good thing, too.  If I try to capture every-freakin'-thing from those circuits, I will never get these documents in the can. I just wrote a 400-word blog about two rivers that course through Epirus, and that took most of the day. Hell, I realized walking through this village today that I could spend a month capturing an hour of light on the Ionian Sea.  

Therefore some accounting may be useful.  I intend to spend five hours a day writing, and most days I exceed that.  It's pointless to set word-goals ~ I'd rather have 10 exquisite words than 1000 dystonic ones, and Ladylord knows we (as a culture) have exploded the dams with our written noise.  So. Smaller, with a commitment to emotional beauty ahead of intellectual 'clarity' - which in my case can lead to hyperhypointraexplanatory excesses.  (See?)

But I remind myself: Quentin has been gone for less than two years, and with Sarah's death, it was more than three before I could write again.   It's coming, my voice, and not so slowly, after all...

(thank you, Greece)

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