Thumb Tapping

On 19 January she wrote in her journal:

It’s been six days since I fell through the crack.  I’m spiraling down depression way again.  The crack has been widening and if I don’t do something to sort it out— San Andreas fault be thy name — you unholy fucking fissure!  I’m out. This is a familiar landscape, I’m never too far from stepping through it, into it, farther and farther down — canyon-like — now in a skirl of whorling minimalist notes, repeated and repeated until I am tranced out and lost.  

Having lost six days now I ask myself: what’s next?  Which way do I move?  What direction?  How do I get out of this, and here I am writing again.  Is it fair enough to start like this again?  The only option really.  How did I get here again?  How do I avoid ending up here again?  I don’t think I can adequately answer the latter, but the first question must be asked always because it presupposes awareness of the situation.  And here is where I usually make the pivot, because a pivot is required.  The only other option isn’t really an option.  Is it?  No.  

So here I’ll start again, and content myself with starting again.  This is an acceptable… No, it’s a good step forward.  It had to begin somewhere.  Why not right here?

******

The next day, the 20th, she wrote:

I exist in meaningless patter, in the trifling titter of expense and abuse.  I persist in this dominant issue of breaking a standard that I once pretended to.  I perform unlimited horrors on my own discernment and troubled world view.  I will disengage from timbre and search for a tone so acute it pilfers life itself.  This signifies nothing within nothing.  

Didn’t Thoreau say, Write while the heat is in you.  The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with.  And that’s why I persist with this thumb tapping.  To use what little heat warms these fingers attached to a tepid body sitting on a cold toilet. And so I start anew.

What I’m Reading:

The primary duty is not to live but to write. I write because I’m unhappy. I write because it is a way of fighting unhappiness. If I didn’t write, I would blow my brains out, without a shadow of a doubt. 

— Mario Vargas Llosa / “The Art of Fiction No. 120” / The Paris Review