A Distant Voice

There is a calmness tonight that I find unsettling.  Night, I think, is one of those funny slips in the twenty-four hours of day.  There are two such slips: night, before I am quite in bed, and morning, before I am quite ready to start my day beyond the walls of my parents' house. Night is for reflection --  for replaying the plot of a movie I've seen; for rewriting and recasting that film and finding in it some niche for myself.  At night, I rewind conversations, wonder whether I should have held my tongue with this person, said more with another, smiled convincingly at an entirely different person, made eye contact with some stranger.

Night is perpetually on the cusp, and so, I've come to believe, is life.  I see myself leaping from the ridge above adulthood to a ridge above middle age to one above old age. Are we always meant to feel unsettled?  Somehow, I had imagined that with adulthood came the sense of permanence, and I begin to wonder if permanence has no place in life. And how strange that I should write of the future at night which I have just committed to reflection.

I think of night in adjectives, great piles of them, and a boy recently told me that a writer shouldn't use too many adjectives.  He'd heard this from a famous writer, and I wanted to ask why she dictated such a rule?  So I imagine myself stacking adjectives until they teeter, like a gleaming, insecure tower of colored glass, and if I must choose to erase one or two, how can I be certain that those I pull won't be load bearing?  Now I see too that I'm using contractions.  In academic writing, this is inadvisable.  I've decided it will be fine here among myself, my computer screen, my elect readers.

Isn't it strange that in an era so apparently opposed to rules that it, or its inhabitants, deems too religious, too political, too __________ (fill in your own -ist here, ageist, racist, sexist, classist, etc.), there have been a proliferation of rules for written language.  There always have been, of course, but now those rules have shifted. Not so much value is placed on rhyme or meter (hooray for syllabic illiterates like myself), but one must avoid other pitfalls.  If I follow those rules, will my writing remind readers of T.S. Eliot, Edna St. Vincent Milay, Dylan Thomas?  Or will I sound again like that teenager I once was, straining to find a place in her poem for a word like "gossamer"?

If I write instinctively, organically, my writing will be more beautiful, but it will not make sense.  Does it matter if poetry, or prose even, makes any sense?

If I would tell you that tonight, for instance, I see myself as a woman in a room in Italy, on the Mediteranean, pushing open the window shutters to face the bright light of day, would you stop me and ask for an explanation?