Writing to the Glimpse

When writing, at some point, I leave behind wandering among false starts, fragmentary notes, and jotted ideas that insist on a too-fluid, too-complex relation to one another, such that I am at a loss even as to how to order them—and I shift into writing sentences, paragraphs. Here, I find (or perhaps chance upon) an opening for the piece, later an ending, and eventually the through-line weaving in between.

This leap, from the glimpse of insight to writing sentences, feels to me a relief, insofar as the stage of wandering is fraught with moments in which, lost, I begin to wonder, “Is there really anything here to say at all?” Yet this leap onto the blank page also carries its own anxiety, because it ties together the act of a first inscription with a question or an unknown: what is possible here? Nevertheless, this leap, once made, brings with it a sense of promise: yes, maybe something is possible. With this promise, I can begin to work with words on the page, with a certain flow between thought and the physical gesture of writing that marks something set into motion.

Inevitably, I will lose the thread and have to find it again. The specter of collapse, of “nothing there,” will loom until I catch sight of the other shore, glimpsing in the distance what the writing might become. The ever-present prospect of getting lost leads me to resist work for spells of time, writing only in fits and starts. Even so, getting lost seems elemental to this unfolding.

Such work is possible because I am willing to go on in the face of the thread that slips away, as if through my fingers, only to return when (and where) I don't expect it. And often at the moment of giving up. My willingness is linked—at times only tenuously—to that very sense of possibility I glimpse with the beginning found. And when I think I “have” something, I now know that I need to hold it with a loose hand, with a sense (itself coming and going) that movement is necessary for something new to come into being—back a