In a twilight state

Monday, December 7, 2015

6:25 a.m. I realized what I needed to do and did not do, all these years, to be a writer. If I had described an asthma attack or a night with or without an attack – a night’s sleep without problems, in the context of expecting or having expected trouble – that would have conveyed to the reader the reality of it. It is because I didn’t understand this that my stories went nowhere. I tried to tell of something happening as if it were a new report but I did not describe why it mattered.

Babe was different. Messenger was different. In both of those, I had the

Papa? I see I’m drifting. It was as much as I could do to remember that much.

It came to you not quite in a dream, not quite as a conscious thought – your best footing, that twilight area.

Yes, it is.

If that is your country, perhaps that is where you need to spend your time writing, if you still want to write.

I kind of do. I don’t know if I can do anything at this late date, but I’d still like to try. I couldn’t do it without reflection, could I?

Let’s say you couldn’t do it without attaining a certain middle distance from your performing self. That self cannot write of twilight things, and you did not intend to write of daylight things nor imagined nighttime things.

That is obscure and yet I sort of get it.

Yes, your settling for sort-of getting things has been part of the problem.

Sort of rather than exactly and clearly.

Well – sort of rather than firmly. Exactly and clearly aren’t necessarily in the nature of what you wanted to do.

I needed to have a firm handle on fog.

You needed to have a first handle on your attention. Claude Monet didn’t have any problem painting fog. His attention assured that. That, and a lifetime of developing his skill. But the point is, he knew what he wanted to do, and he put his mind to it. He didn’t sort-of paint and sort-of see what fog did and how it felt and looked by its reflected effects. He pin-point examined it, came to know it, and then he could paint it. When you work like that, your failures are not losses, because they are teaching you. but you have to know what it is you want to do.

Is there still a reason to do this if it is too late for me to become a writer?

You mean, if you don’t mind a rough paraphrase – is there a reason to do something you can’t make a living at? The question answers itself. Either the thing is worth doing for its own sake or only as a means to an end. If the end is no longer attainable (assuming it ever was), the thing will either cease to be attractive to you, or it will not. If it is attractive, surely it is worth doing because something – understood or not – is making it attractive to you.

Now, this entirely disregards the question of necessary practicalities. Even a thing done as a means to an end ought to be done as well as you can do it, or you are wasting your life. And if you are constrained by externals to do something you’d rather not, remember that externals are merely internals unrecognized or at any rate still active and un-dealt-with. So in that sense, nothing can be external to you, except in appearance.

I thought this was going to be only for me, but I suppose it is useful to others, if I give it to them.

What else have you been doing, this past 25 years, but reporting on what you learn? It doesn’t matter if you are the first to learn it, or the five-millionth, everybody learns something a little different, because they come to it (whatever it is) a little different.

But I remember the psychic saying to me that my higher self was getting frustrated because I kept deflection the things he sent me to others.

Frustration or not, its still your choice. It is always your choice.

I started to write that we’d come a long way from that simple realization I had as in a dream, or coming out of a dream – but then I realized, no, this is me functioning in a twilight state.

Of course. You have only to compare quality – not to mention quantity! – of what you produce this way and what you produce by daylight, so to speak. Not that this is everybody’s path, but that everybody has a path.

This is all I feel like doing at the moment.

Don’t let past transmissions / conversations pile up untranscribed too long or you will become overwhelmed and will not be able to do it. It might be worth your while to put a small check mark by the ones you transcribe, just as an aide-memoire.

Okay, thanks.