The Tide Of All Existence

Blaming Virginia Woolf for this outburst… describing the construction of the self as:

‘like a butterfly’s wing…clamped together with bolts of iron.’

wrote this first as a stream of consciousness exercise no punctuation just flow one word into the next it was a strong old tide indeed

This morning, as my world is poised at the start of another summer storm, I broached a light rewriting, just to make it readable, and although it’s all about me (diva!) I dare to hope that the feeling of transformation in a life is familiar to all. 

The urge to write comes late last night. It will not cease to pester: it fills my head with irritable fidgety creatures. 

I can’t settle and neither can they. 

I don’t know what they are, what strange party I am hosting here. 

But there’s nothing here that is not part of my own self, even though they seem uninvited, they must be part of my mosaic, my pinterest board of butterfly wings, held with iron bolts, they cannot leave. I make myself as a collage is made, cut outs, paste ons, an assembly of disparate parts reassembled into a surpassing integral picture. Each new time becoming this winged creature, each new time leaving the old skin, even as a spider leaves empty shells of itself at the edge of the web, an echo of who I was: I see that the strange and aggravating creatures are my bursts of transformation, splitting free a restrictive husk. A trail of them, these thin husked milestones, around the edge of my own picture. As the light and shadows play within I watch the actions of the years passing, observe it becoming fainter, more representational, delve to a deeper underlying thing beyond the summation of any art. 

Yet I can name it simply as being alive, as sharing the adventure. This is me, in a book of stories that has not yet ceased, that began before writing, before people, it is as big as time. 

I do not know where the ink comes from, only that I feel it beating, feel it as a venal tide: the pull of it is the tide of all existence.