The Middling
Shhhh. Calm your mind. Don’t stir the embers.
But it’s too late. The pipebowl of his skull is glowing, smoky mantras coiling through his brain. All these little affirmations, these maxims and slogans that he has pitched to himself, over and over, sometimes written down with an urgent, confident hand, sometimes spoken aloud into the gloss of the bathroom mirror, sometimes recited silently with the precision and force of an incantation meant to shape the world around him or shape himself within the world.
Stick with it.
All right then, go it alone.
It isn’t supposed to be like this.
It’s all wrong. It’s not what you thought it would be. But it’s ok.
Make peace with it.
Somewhere along the way Spenser lost the antecedent to his life’s purpose. (He hates the fact that this is the metaphor that comes to him. He thinks he could do much better. Maybe something about grains of sediment lazily gyring in the tidepools of his life, or maybe work with the image of a barbwire fence slowly being consumed, year after year, by the imperceptible swell of a treetrunk). But no. Somehow he has forgotten the very thing he is attempting to justify on a daily basis, and the best he can do is figure his life as a sentence with a misplaced antecedent.
What is it? What was he urging himself to seek and to treasure and to not lament? How could it be all of these things? What if it was the confusion he felt right now?
it. Think about the word. The i with its distinguishing speck, rising, or floating, or weightless, or stuck in some interminable orbit, forever alone. The t, the cross to bear.
Shhhh. Calm your mind.
What is it? What was it?
Shhhh.
it.
Shit.
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