IT'S IMPORTANT

It’s important to let the words sink deeply into the page, an unribboned current of ink let loose in the blood until it merges indistinguishably with your most intimate emotions and thoughts if you want to write from the inside out. I’m sick of the mispelt writing on the wall glyphed out in the cursive script of comets that turn out to be nothing more than burning kites. Sometimes I put off the serious business of the boy to attend to the childish needs of the man, but mostly I am dunced by a genius that labours absurdly by the mindstream for profundities in the pan, unsayable things, gleaming insights that might root a rootless man. If it’s all absurd, then what’s the point of sending absurdity to school? So my discipline is absurdly free. My eyes can supersede the speed of light, and the relative nowness of my seeing is the past, is all available dimensions of the future that will establish me on either side of the Atlantic Ridge of my nose. And yet nothing is divided. Even when my third eye is used like a ball in a lacrosse game. My focus is primordial. Sometimes I see what the snake sees; sometimes I’m an ocean of eyes, and once, having made it as far as the precipice of a genuine abyss, I looked out into space and saw that the emptiness was one face with billions of eyes looking back at me like a gathering of rain just before it falls. What else could I do but flower? What more could I be than I was in that visionary hour? Since then, the best has been to work at things that are not threatened by achievement. Affairs of the heart. Affairs of the spirit. And, at the end of the day, there is no one so squalid that can’t wash the world off in their own unattainability.

PATRICK WHITE