In a Silent Way

The dolls helped me find words. I did not find the dolls at first, not for a long time that may have been a year. They were tucked away in a room of the mansion I did not venture around. The mansion was huge, and its interior felt like many different houses and structures strung together next to each other in one architectural design, so that after a little bit of preliminary wandering, I had settled on a set of rooms that could serve as a comfortable "house" for me to live in, and there was no reason to explore the rest (beyond curiosity, which the desire for rest at this point overshadowed). Any exploration would quickly run into the issue of exhaustion, as the true scope of that mansion had to have been on the scale of square miles.

The mansion's interior plan, as I eventually got a sense, had modularity to it. A bunch of rooms make up a "house." A bunch of houses are neighbors around a "courtyard," which in some cases is a literal open-roof courtyard (more like a whole park) and in other cases is an assortment of unique rooms. I had no reason to call them "houses" or "courtyards" other than my own need to name them, so don't get caught up in the names. Fundamentally it was all rooms, rooms, rooms.

In any case, my house bordered one given courtyard, and the dolls were in a room several courtyards away, so it was inevitable that I wouldn't find them for a long time. I spent that long time perhaps a little aware of the dolls, paradoxically. I was aware of the mental trap into which I had stumbled, an unequal venting of inertia until starting myself back up again proved more effort than all sense suggested, and furthermore I was also aware of an irrational Hope emerging from the wordless patterns of Tired... a hope that this lack of inertia which had itself come out of inertia would, itself, one day resolve. A hope that I would one day again move, spurred on by some hypothetical curiosity. I reasoned that a mansion like this must contain many curiosities-- many things that I would find curious. Surely. And it did, of course. But even in the profound period of laziness, I still had a hope that I would find some of them, and that I would react appropriately, find them.. curious.

I'm perhaps getting away from myself here. But this style of ramble is appropriate for the contents being narrated. These words fit the wordless, as it's not really about the words, but about the rhythms and structures, the inexhaustible exhaustion, the round-and-round roundabout riddles, every promise of a new subject seeing interruption as the discursive voice sinks into an old whirlpool. Really, it is no wonder that I spent much time resting, but now imagine these whirlpool sentences carrying on even when the words have ceased, imagine a ramble of empty sentences, a roundabout of punctuation-- then you will have considered the chamber music of my everyday life in that mansion.

           ,                                     ,                                                     ,                                    '                           .                                                             ,              .                                                         ,                               until            self                                                          ,                                                                                                    ...                          inertia                              inertia       ,       ,                .                                       ,                                          .                                                                  --                                      .       .           ,           .              the                               ,                                                     ,                                     ,           ..         .

 

That, for (I want to say "several") unbroken years, was my mental landscape. Some words, memories of words, washed up from the waves of blank, flotsam from a skillset I once had. It is vital to me now that I have or am retraining my articulation that I try many times to retroactively describe what it was like. Autobiography is a priority, and I am too spiteful to have gone through that and let it remain unspoken.

But the dolls.

I'm still not ready to talk about the dolls yet. There's a bit more I have to say.