This is the self as shards.
These fragments I have shored against my ruins, Eliot wrote, and he was right, for at times I'm bursting with things I could do, or could write, and yet I'm inert, vibrating cosmicomically in potentia, but nothing's going anywhere. I'm a bag of jangling fragments; the fragments are things I've read, watched or seen; they're the ripplings and questionings of a life spent either attention-deficit or hyperaware, with no cushioned in-between. A big bag of jangling shards, like a present with the ironic smirk of FRAGILE stamped on its crumpled cardboard.
Want to do, want to make. Making comes from the self, but the self is fractured. Not clever enough: this isn't the fishing it seems. I'm not clever enough to understand what I want to understand, to _truly_ get what's going on. I stop just short of knowing, swerve to something else, hold on to the wet rocks there for a while, but slip, again
we'll slide down the surface of things
So many images; I used to think they were like beads on a rosary; but no, they're arranged in an infinite hall of smashed mirrors. What's reflected back is so unrecognisable it might as well be the image of my constituent parts at the atomic level, diffused and separated to the extreme as I expand outwards, like a gas or Parkinson's law.
Expand, expand – but there's no more matter. There is only the expansion, a thinning, a fracturing. Image on image on image.
Give it a key. There has to be an analogous key. A minor. All the white notes; let's keep it uncomplicated. We can hit any of them and pretend it's a melody. The connections between the notes are a fiction; at the same time I'm picking up bits of glass and they're not mirrors anymore but instead permanently imprinted with the image of me they held at the moment of the smashing
like tears in rain
not like tears in rain.
Keep it in A minor. Hofstadter said everything was analogy. What do we have so far? The forcing together of mirror (with all the attendant symbolism of glass and pain and cleanliness; plus, don't forget what you read the other day but never followed up on – glass is a liquid) to a musical motif, but at the same time there is no motif, save that of random notes played (hell, you could play them with a fist – no finesse required here) and we pretend there's meaning, and all the while I'm writing this meta-thing, this parody of stream-of-consciousness, or maybe it _is_ stream of consciousness, or maybe I'm just not doing punctuation properly
all art is trash
So, make a rosary from the shards. Blood comes, but that's pleasingly apposite.
keep playing in A minor
(who put that BLUE NOTE IN THERE? THAT E FLAT HAS NO BUSINESS MAKING THE SCALE ALL BLUESY)
that is precisely the WRONG MOOD FOR THIS PIECE; YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO BE BEING SERIOUS
(you forgot about rhythm in your obsession with melody)
(but here it comes)
(sexy slinky syncopation)
(obviously you can't fight it)
(fingersnap fingersnap)
(don't you DARE scat; nobody wants to hear thatdobedapbapbap)
here we go
into the groove
dancing, on the glass
it crunches under your feet,
like snow.