his path was marked
by the stars in the southern hemisphere
and he walked his days under african skies.
this is the story of how we begin to remember.
this is the powerful pulsing of love in the vein.
after the dream of falling and calling your name out,
these are the roots of rhythm and the roots of rhythm remain
I’ve got a lyric, some time here at work (it’s a slow day), but nothing to write about. Well, scratch that; I’ve got plenty to write about but nothing’s springing to mind at the moment.
The lyrics are from Paul Simon’s strangely affecting “Under African Skies.” I’ve always liked the song. I love Simon’s lyrics in any context; he’s got a real flair for capturing moments and emotions with sparse collections of words that intersect the event being alluded to at oblique angles. The effect is to catch you slightly off guard, enough to want to unpack the lyrics, but they aren’t so abstract or off-putting that they drive you away. In other words, they’re accessible but profound, like good poetry.
I think a lot about how my writing tapered off somewhat after I got married, and about the brief, sporadic stints of heavy journaling I’ve had since then, and what that all means. The most obvious thing the situation reflects upon is my motivation to write in the first place. It’s not much of a stretch to make a connection between my frequent journaling in the past and my desire to meet someone I could be with. I always suppressed that connection, denied to myself that that’s why I wrote as much as I did, and tried to channel that motivation in support of subjects I really did think and care about, but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a factor at all. Fortunately, by the grace of God, I think I was able to “harness” the emotional élan that feeling of longing provided in service of more diverse topics than simply moping about being single, or posting a continual series of “sweet nothings” intended to attract a potential bride. It was buried deep down, again, to the point where I didn’t openly admit to myself it was a factor, but it certainly did “kick start” more than one philosophical or introspective essay.
And of course, once we’ve established that as a piece of the “motivational pie,” it follows that once I started dating and got married, the longing I felt was rightly satisfied in Diane, that particular emotional boost evaporated, and the net result was that my posts became less frequent.
I think there’s more to it than that, though. We’ve been married for four years now, been through a fair share of ups and downs with respect to our life situation and level of busyness, and my stints of frequent posting (most significantly the one at the end of ’08) belie the notion that the longing was a necessary component of those spates of activity.
Also, I can completely deny any connection between the frequent posting any the state of the emotional connection between Diane and me. In other words, it’s false logic to assume that because I post more since we’ve been married, the sense of longing has returned, driving some kind of need for self-expression unfulfilled by Diane. No—I am completely satisfied in her; she hears everything first, and what follows in here is no reflection whatsoever on the “state of our marriage,” or what-have-you.
More than anything, as mundane as it sounds, I honestly think it comes down to habit and practice. This has been borne out time and again throughout the roughly 10 years I’ve been blogging. Once I have some momentum under my belt, the lights come on the parts of my brain accustomed to expressing my thoughts in writing, at a certain speed, and the words just come. Simple as that. It’s incumbent upon me to keep it up.