concrescence, or growing together
Of my week, all things said and done, I relished the persisting troubled sleep. Night upon night of sweetly shipwrecking on the rocks. To me nocturnal restlessness is by far the more interesting state of mind. Waking in the middle of night with the troubled mind of a thousand spot fires on the verge of growing together into that fiery front greater than the sum of its parts. Concrescere! A convulsion of many minds in one. Darting this way and that. Each haplessly splashing about a few spades of water in its tiny bucket. Or else glued to the spot in sheer terror.
My stir and panic was about control. Useless control. Even worse is the retreat into timidity which follows. For the sake of timidity, I had been smothering out the very life of my mind with endless distractions. Distractions which titillate, but only ever so slightly. Distractions devoid of meaning in case of suddenly irrupting into roaring significance. But now I cannot unsee this poison keeping me subdued.
When did I choose to wake? At four o’clock this morning, precisely. I was a nervous tremble. Spot fires everywhere. I plugged my earhole to soothe myself with the sounds of a podcast. But the host’s gentle voice was too tinny in the tiny earphone. And, following his cadence of thought, I myself began to think his thinkings at the annoying remove of bafflement or utter boredom – I could not tell which. So I exasperatedly flicked the earphone aside. For some minutes I lay waiting and watching my thoughts fly past in great traumatic rivers. Then, as goes all flirting at the boundary, I first surrendered myself to them and then, once along for the ride, recast my surrender as taking a noble stand. The biggest swells and soaring crests began collapsing upon themselves. The river subsided and a single mottled pebble remained. Its stillness stayed my own raging appetite for comfort. And I rose and went to clean forks and spoons in my tiny kitchen sink, and make chai. Only now I have passed to the other side can I laugh huge guffaws at the faux nobility which got me here. Is is time to kick down my ladder?