Caught on radar a couple days ago:
“Should is the killer word in the English language.” Tobias Wolff quoting Michel Herr in conversation with George Saunders last evening, three authors. Should I explore this? Should I try writing about it? Nah. Another day. But it was nice seeing George on screen, an aside to our ether-mediated text trading of the last decades.
Morning comes and writing, any writing, needs to happen to both purge and to temporarily preserve what is left of Life. (While acknowledging that there is no craft available here to draw on, only a poorly exercised habit of projecting symbolic detritus from mind to screen: excretion.)
Okay, the should problem. One obstacle set oblique to it: the close-to-asymptotic barrier in writing truth. Especially when the perception of weakness arrives in view when attempting to write such. Why is this? Is it that behind any truth is the reified presence of mortality? Photographer Richard Misrach comes to mind, describing his impression of the desert as having a ‘terrible beauty.’ It is within the verity of instantaneous sensual engagement with the world we subsequently come to know that we are transitory. This initiates a deep terror: the only escape from which is a return into the ongoing flow of the senses receiving the source of that terrible beauty. It is the process of reification, fixing the image, that is the initial corruption of truth. Writing that approaches truth is writing that is sourced in the precognitive, the pre-rational, the pre-symbolic: the momentary encounter committed to page with a crafted or spontaneous urgency. Should is the reified abstraction of Life.
I should try to transcend this limit. I really should: Black speck on the wall. A fly. No compunction to snuff a life with dried and calloused hands made so after cleaning thousands of tiny fly-shits on surfaces, no, on edges around the house. Yes, insects excrete. And, yes, they habituate certain places for this: edges, corners, windows, shitting, tiny rust-red circles, a couple millimeters in diameter. I should cease writing and continue cleaning the house. Were that I was a fly on the wall, I should take a shit as well. Should write, should shit, should clean. This is how life goes.