A Spiral Spins Slowly.

Whatever thought might have just occurred, it too is lost. Sadly, this has generally been the way of things these past several months. Since returning from Italy, I haven't had all that much to say. Actually, that's a lie. I've had plenty to say; I've just been unable to say it. The words are still keeping me awake at night--they like to tease me so--and little else has changed.

The question, then, is where have these thoughts gone? What wrong turn is it on the path from Awareness to Endeavoring that so many thoughts should take? Do they find themselves trapped in Memory; on some New Jersey-esque roundabout that takes them from Then to Then to the Then before?

If so, I pitty them, as my memories have been rather dull as of late. I don't mean to say they've been uninteresting or boring. I mean to say they've been "dull." Colorless. Flat. Without any more actual lived-detail than a tawdry bit of fantasy art. Sure, it looks good, and once someone's told you what to imagine, it's easy enough to conjure up in the mind, but it doesn't feel like anything. It isn't yours in the way that other forms of art reflect some aspect of commonality. Some piece of lived- and living- detail.

I remember thinking, as a child, that I should like to go mad some day. I had once thought that my dissertation would be on madness and insanity (yes, I was thinking of writing my dissertation even then.) Now I think my thoughts of writing a dissertation are madness and insanity, but that's for another even more self-indulgent post.

My point, if I have one, is that it now seems to me that the gyre on which one's consciousness rides turns ever more slowly than we're lead to believe. I no longer think people snap so much as slide. As one's mind inevitably changes over time, it corrects itself, or its idea of itself, so as to diffuse any apparent irregularities. It's these subtle changes in the roadmap that accumulate over time. A one-thousandth degree shift from parallel over an un-measured distance makes for invisible wrong turns. The roads converge eventually, but subtly, and for a time they are indistinguishable.