When I don’t write for awhile the amount of pure drivel that comes out of me is astonishing. It’s sort of like a child seeing her own blood for the first time – “This was inside me? Christ.” The drivel flows uninterrupted, and the old corpse-words are thrown out onto the dead-wagons, and I start nattering about “stars” and “roses” or whatever.*
These sorts of word usages have been lopped off at the knees from their original meaning, and now tumble down a set of endless stairs winding hellward into an ever-greater meaninglessness. They don’t bring an image, they just exist in their shape and their sound and previous iterations. They forget to bring alcohol to the party, they tell the same jokes which have become so degraded and creaky in the telling that it is no longer apparent whether they were ever even funny.
But they fill the silence. They fill pages and texts and books, they fill the mind’s small thimble of attention for preternaturally useless milliseconds. The cold stars, the rank stars, the spoor of stars, the stain of stars, the glimmering mantle of stars, the pinwheel of roses, the ache of roses, the rosing rosin rigamarole of roses.
The mind lacks pliancy, and reverts to snuffling the same holes like a haggard dog in its yard. When I start expectorating slimy drivel like I was raised in a tedium forest by wild drivel wolves, I get this Throbbing Gristle song in my head:
Discipline! Discipline! I need discipline!
* (these are just stand-ins for any manner of cliched or overused words I tend to use).
themenaceofobjects 