my own little babel.

This month I will be writing without ears. I will be the deaf muse, scribbling only the actions and the unfolding drama, and not the verbal arrangements. Like an old black and white film set to the tune of a musical background, my pen will find a song to play behind the scenes.

To write without understanding has its disadvantages. It seems incomplete. Imagine reviewing a political address without hearing the speech. What can one pull out of simply watching the crowd, or the man or woman at the podium? Perhaps you could gather the tone of the event through the pumping fist of the speaker or the jarred expression on a face in the crowd, but you still would not know the words that evoked them. You are left writing a piece with missing pieces.

But perhaps there are advantages as well. By not hearing words, you are distanced from the biases and manipulations of others. You are able to see things purely as they are happening, without thieves present to rob or change your perceived understanding. Sure you still have your own biases, but don’t you always?

In any event the purpose of my writing, at its base, is egocentric. I am not writing to prove, to conclude, to sell, or to persuade. Rather, I am writing to display my own thoughts in front of my own self, so that when I look at them later, I can eat them up and spit them back onto paper in a refined arrangement, an order that might get me closer to the core, closer to understanding.

To understanding what? What else is there but to discover where my maniacal God is in all of this?