feeling of destiny to the morning

(The morning after playing live music for silent film, I was physically tired but mentally and creatively energized. It felt like the floodgates had been opened, after a long time suffering post-illness, post-surgery, and all sorts of white light creative waters were flowing through. I sat down and wrote in my handwritten journal that morning, feeling like writing by hand was more proper and right, and a poem and a contemplation spilled out. The floodgates have stayed open: I am still in the flow for now.

It seemed important, that morning, to document the process. It was an episode of writing at white heat, a state of creative being I have come to recognize and rely upon, as it usually results in good creative work, or the seed of such work later. This is one of the rare times I have self-consciously documented the process of what it feels like to write at white heat; I present it here by way of example.

Note: the second section was all one page in the journal, streaming out in a solid block of writing; I have broken it into pseudo-paragraphs here only for ease of reading.)



intense vivid god-wrought and -given dreams later
sit naked in morning sunlight at the dining room table
light warm and bright streaming in skin soaks up warmth
after a chill night wrapped bundled in blankets
dreams making all the difference giving meaning
give purpose feeling of destiny to the morning
sense of splendor clear blue sky and distant traffic sounds
like waves at every beach rise and fall awakening
rising falling passing away back into the silent ocean

urge for going urge for writing poems half-formed in dream
in mind but stopped halfway because the pressure
behind them runs out that spiritual white heat presence that
propels all this making this writing this to go on living
only reason that means anything anymore without the daily making
there's no point no purpose to life no dreams no rationing
no reason to care about why we're here why we live
just that endless canyon void I've seen before that terrifies

but stop here I am this morning hot sun on my shoulder
arm side of head as I sit sipping tea and writing
a morning awake after lucid dreams full of lessons given
truth you know but need to remind yourself of some greater power
speaking decides it's time to slap soothe anchor you into remembering
and so the morning is the first morning of the world remade
again and again just like it has so many times risen
from death abyss dying rising again a breaking wave into this brilliant light



•



—sometimes you forget that you just need to write by hand some mornings, not at the computer; that you need to drag yourself into the sunlight and sit and read there in the morning (today skimmed Big Sur by Kerouac, record of his breakdown into paranoid madness in cabin in woods, so like my own various bouts of wintermind) (when I actually let go and let the wolves flood over the snow and into my heart) and then sit some time in sunlight and write by hand in this long-suffering neglected road journal, this big book of things made many places but mostly away from home base;

and after vivid dreams whose tone and joy and pleasure and temper linger with you for contemplative hours sitting hot sun on your shoulder you are at last after the false starts of recent weeks the stutters and half-birthed ideas suddenly you're given a real poem;

finally a real poem, not just an aborted effort;

and this becomes the break in the logjam, the first morning of the world, the very first day, after death and rebirth;



and the dream that was about the flow releases the real flow into the day again, and suddenly for the first real time in real months you're given a morning full of creative fire, and you make a real poem everything flowing flooding out of all of a sudden changing pens because the beautiful calligraphy pen is too slow for the flow;

the world has begun to move again and your dams are released to floodwaters going down narrow canyons to an invisible infinite ocean;

and the day begins already having given you what you need for living, a real poem, art, mythos, eros, life itself;