Sunday, April 1
palm fool’s sunday
It’s the afternoon of Palm Sunday, and I’m sitting on the bed drinking bad Australian Chardonnay out of a plastic Salvation Army mug with the “God Loves You” and the yellow smiley face mostly worn off of the side.
I had a minor epiphany last night about the iterative, cumulative, one little
piece at a time nature of the creative act. I wouldn’t swear to it, but I think
it initially had something to do with the idea of iterating over lists in
programming languages. Anyway I sat up in bed and wrote a note for myself about
for and map that no longer makes any particular sense.
The substance of the thing - and I have at least one of these moments every night, as I fall asleep trying to somehow reconcile the failures of the day with the elaborate promises I made myself the night before, so it’s not as if most of them have much substance - was that anything I am ever likely to leave in my wake will be the product (the residue, perhaps) of small movements and actions accumulated over weeks, months, and years. It’ll take some organic shape, because I am powerless to do a thing about it. This isn’t intent. It’s low-key compulsion. The things that stick at all are accidental, incidental, the result of some few habits which leave traces. The beer-bottle caps in a jar on top of my refrigerator.