Time

by John Clay

This is a time to write everything. When my craft was crude, I did. When pages were thick with needless words and flat with stalled flights of argument. When eleven themes clogged every essay and essays were attempts never finished. I wrote everything. And if it had been said many times before, as everything has been, at least it was said again so that I knew it.

But now—it is unsaid and forgotten. No words that might be needless. No argument that might stall. In this strange time in which I hope to write better, I am writing shorter and less and might fall silent.

Maybe someone else will speak for me and say it all again. How often is enough? Every next time a thing is marked in words or in acts, it is known again as something that can be said or done. It comes the third time because it is known from the second, and the fourth from the third. And if too many opportunities for expression are missed, then it comes again only by the greatest new effort. Momentum carries culture and can be lost. Some things are said all the time. Some of my favorite things in the world are almost never said.

The sky is neutral white. Sun fades and takes the shadows with it. In the morning, here and there was bright and dark and now there is faint light—little light, but everywhere. I can see in either: neutral or bright. This is the time for everything. Sense and nonsense are the poles on the axis of our turns of thought. And even in its absence, sense is felt.

What is unfinished is not lost, but instead has never been. There are no attempts. There are works. Large or small, they are decided and done. And because done, they can be known to myself and the world. In my attempts I wrote nothing. Nothing was said and nothing known—because if I had known it I would have finished it. Maybe now, for the first time, I am speaking. I see through the thick and cut it and feel the stall and lift up again. It is not that I am energized but that I am too tired to try. After the spastic vigor and endless effort of early years, now I can only do. The momentum that carries culture also carries life. It carries us for a time.