Well said and well observed. I suspect that the visceral, dare I say incongruent discomfort you’ve described (in light of what sounds to be an otherwise deeply satisfying life) is a consequence of our human inheritance: our hearts and minds can see and imagine and feel, far beyond the spatial (and temporal) limitations of our bodies to build and experience and control.
From what you’ve offered here, it seems to me that we may find solace (reconciliation mayhaps?) in writing because, in a way, it offers an avenue of transcendence. As you’ve characterized it, writing is a craft (form of agency?) that can hold and shape both present and future, even as we are bound by the limits of our bodily/spiritual inheritance (or so I imagined as you spoke of your father. And of CNN). Please let me know if this resonates with you (or your soulfully constituent laws of physics). And thank you for taking the time to share the sensations of your universe!
I smiled all the way through this comment. I absolutely write because I am a control freak of my reality. It’s an exercise of agency that I find so incredibly comforting. Sometimes, when I’m “down bad,” phrases that capture my state will start flashing through my mind. When it happens often enough with solid lines to weave together, I sit my ass down and write.
It’s how I cope with the strange inheritance of my humanity—Which I think you’ve nailed. My ability to understand more than the immediacy of my environment is certainly the cause of much strife. In a bizarre, nearly divine twist of the knife, the morning after publishing this piece, I learned a childhood friend of mine committed suicide. She was found dead that day.
Was my pain in the moment of writing this partly syphoned from her aching, panicked heart? Did our invisible string hold strong through ten years of silence for me to feel her agony 2,000 miles away? I’ll never know, but I like to think so. I like to think that we are much closer to each other’s hearts and thoughts than we realize. And this, writing, is how I bridge that gap.
Thank you for your thoughtfulness on this. I appreciate your attentiveness and complete open curiosity. Charmed.
I am so very glad this made you smile!! Curiosity feels like love’s first form, kinda like when we’re children, full of a general sense of wonderment and curiosity about the world and others. I wonder sometimes if it’s this part of us (more resilient in some folks than others) that holds those invisible strings that tie us together as we wander and age. It’s love in a way, and what other than curiosity is the impetus for reaching out/connecting with others!
I wish you grace and ease in your grief. Truly. I’ve shared this experience, and I’ve had few that were more devastating.
I believe you are connected, Sky. In my view, each of us carries bits and pieces and parts of the other universes (i.e. people) we collide with along our way. Though the ecosystem is, for the most part, entirely too large and great for any single person to grasp in totality, we all experience its totality together. Those pieces of other universes that we carry in our own, the ones that resonate deepest with those who first offered these gifts, also resonate with us, but in ways that may be unexpected or unfamiliar.
To be curious is to demonstrate reverence and gratitude for these pieces, to become familiar with them. Then, they’re like easter eggs! (oh shit, Easter, rebirth…)
Like an antenna almost: you start to pick up different frequency bands, or all of a sudden you can see the world with flashes of ultraviolet or infrared. Some easter eggs (and I think this happens with music/writing) even allow you to transcend space and time. With this framing (and forgive me if this is a bit too hokey) curiosity may be understood as a maturation process, as a growing up. We See better, love deeper, open ourselves to great joy and tremendous pain. We can feel in HD, with clarity given to us by those we’ve come in contact with/been proximate to along our way. Suffice to say, we start to See (and with patience/discernment, live) in full color. Proximity, at the scale of the human, is everything.
Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451, The Illustrated Man, etc.) said in an interview that he gets “bitten” while writing, and does his best to put pen to paper to narrate the experience/sensations before the bug lets go. My favorite high school English teacher characterized a similar experience as “catching lightning in a bottle.”
Knowingly or not, your friend sent you lightning. Thank god you’ve got a good antenna. Great bandwidth. She has entrusted her energies, in part, to you. Thanks for bottling it for the rest of us so that we might See. Some serious soul power in action right there lmaoo
Sky Fisher(woman), You are graced with skills and insights that belie your quarter decade of breathing the Earth’s atmosphere, which is so perfectly and chemically attuned to make us and much more than us possible. You have shown yourself to be a precious polemicist in both political and cultural matters, and now your aptitude as a diarist is showing itself. If you’ve not yet read the diaries of Anäis Nin, I highly suggest that you do. I’m one of the maligned boomer generation (I’m sympathetic to the criticisms we deserve), so I could only read her edited diaries. It wasn’t until the 1980s that the unexpurgated version of those were published. I haven’t read those, but instinct says to start there. Great to have you alive and well in Substack, regardless the subject self examination of this essay. I was diagnosed with chronic depression in 1969. It’s been my most faithful companion through the decades. Yes, I have learned that it has lessons to teach me. Although often it’s been but a cruel slave master. Carry on beautiful daughter of the Sun. You have needed, indeed expected, gifts to gestate and birth to this amazing if beset (by parasites!) and beleaguered world. 🙏🏻cv
Clifford :,) You are such a delight—I’m always excited to read your thoughts. Thank you for the generosity of your kindness. I’m thinking I might set up new publications within my substack fro diary, poetry, and culture writing so it’s not quite so eclectic. Thoughts?
Let me give this some thought. I just began a new 30 day regime of blood thinners yesterday, and they seem to be making me foggy and groggy. Just let me repeat here how much I enjoy your writings. I don’t always find my thoughts in lockstep agreement with yours, but I always find the workings of your mind to be engaging and thought provoking. You are a gifted writer, agile thinker, with a broad range of interests, and a force to be reckoned with on the page. Probably off the page too, at least when the weight of the collective bullshit hasn’t knocked you onto the mat. It comes with the territory to sensitive souls. I know. This sentence from Emerson’s letter to Walt Whitman upon reading the first edition (1855) of “Leaves of Grass” captures my thoughts well:
“I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere for such a start.”
Well said and well observed. I suspect that the visceral, dare I say incongruent discomfort you’ve described (in light of what sounds to be an otherwise deeply satisfying life) is a consequence of our human inheritance: our hearts and minds can see and imagine and feel, far beyond the spatial (and temporal) limitations of our bodies to build and experience and control.
From what you’ve offered here, it seems to me that we may find solace (reconciliation mayhaps?) in writing because, in a way, it offers an avenue of transcendence. As you’ve characterized it, writing is a craft (form of agency?) that can hold and shape both present and future, even as we are bound by the limits of our bodily/spiritual inheritance (or so I imagined as you spoke of your father. And of CNN). Please let me know if this resonates with you (or your soulfully constituent laws of physics). And thank you for taking the time to share the sensations of your universe!
I smiled all the way through this comment. I absolutely write because I am a control freak of my reality. It’s an exercise of agency that I find so incredibly comforting. Sometimes, when I’m “down bad,” phrases that capture my state will start flashing through my mind. When it happens often enough with solid lines to weave together, I sit my ass down and write.
It’s how I cope with the strange inheritance of my humanity—Which I think you’ve nailed. My ability to understand more than the immediacy of my environment is certainly the cause of much strife. In a bizarre, nearly divine twist of the knife, the morning after publishing this piece, I learned a childhood friend of mine committed suicide. She was found dead that day.
Was my pain in the moment of writing this partly syphoned from her aching, panicked heart? Did our invisible string hold strong through ten years of silence for me to feel her agony 2,000 miles away? I’ll never know, but I like to think so. I like to think that we are much closer to each other’s hearts and thoughts than we realize. And this, writing, is how I bridge that gap.
Thank you for your thoughtfulness on this. I appreciate your attentiveness and complete open curiosity. Charmed.
I am so very glad this made you smile!! Curiosity feels like love’s first form, kinda like when we’re children, full of a general sense of wonderment and curiosity about the world and others. I wonder sometimes if it’s this part of us (more resilient in some folks than others) that holds those invisible strings that tie us together as we wander and age. It’s love in a way, and what other than curiosity is the impetus for reaching out/connecting with others!
I wish you grace and ease in your grief. Truly. I’ve shared this experience, and I’ve had few that were more devastating.
I believe you are connected, Sky. In my view, each of us carries bits and pieces and parts of the other universes (i.e. people) we collide with along our way. Though the ecosystem is, for the most part, entirely too large and great for any single person to grasp in totality, we all experience its totality together. Those pieces of other universes that we carry in our own, the ones that resonate deepest with those who first offered these gifts, also resonate with us, but in ways that may be unexpected or unfamiliar.
To be curious is to demonstrate reverence and gratitude for these pieces, to become familiar with them. Then, they’re like easter eggs! (oh shit, Easter, rebirth…)
Like an antenna almost: you start to pick up different frequency bands, or all of a sudden you can see the world with flashes of ultraviolet or infrared. Some easter eggs (and I think this happens with music/writing) even allow you to transcend space and time. With this framing (and forgive me if this is a bit too hokey) curiosity may be understood as a maturation process, as a growing up. We See better, love deeper, open ourselves to great joy and tremendous pain. We can feel in HD, with clarity given to us by those we’ve come in contact with/been proximate to along our way. Suffice to say, we start to See (and with patience/discernment, live) in full color. Proximity, at the scale of the human, is everything.
Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451, The Illustrated Man, etc.) said in an interview that he gets “bitten” while writing, and does his best to put pen to paper to narrate the experience/sensations before the bug lets go. My favorite high school English teacher characterized a similar experience as “catching lightning in a bottle.”
Knowingly or not, your friend sent you lightning. Thank god you’ve got a good antenna. Great bandwidth. She has entrusted her energies, in part, to you. Thanks for bottling it for the rest of us so that we might See. Some serious soul power in action right there lmaoo
Excellent comment.
And I'm just here wishing and longing for you to be in my arms where I can hold you and smell your sweet head. Feel hugged my love 🫂💗
I love you, momma.
And I love you, my fierce warrioress 💪🌟🔥
Sky Fisher(woman), You are graced with skills and insights that belie your quarter decade of breathing the Earth’s atmosphere, which is so perfectly and chemically attuned to make us and much more than us possible. You have shown yourself to be a precious polemicist in both political and cultural matters, and now your aptitude as a diarist is showing itself. If you’ve not yet read the diaries of Anäis Nin, I highly suggest that you do. I’m one of the maligned boomer generation (I’m sympathetic to the criticisms we deserve), so I could only read her edited diaries. It wasn’t until the 1980s that the unexpurgated version of those were published. I haven’t read those, but instinct says to start there. Great to have you alive and well in Substack, regardless the subject self examination of this essay. I was diagnosed with chronic depression in 1969. It’s been my most faithful companion through the decades. Yes, I have learned that it has lessons to teach me. Although often it’s been but a cruel slave master. Carry on beautiful daughter of the Sun. You have needed, indeed expected, gifts to gestate and birth to this amazing if beset (by parasites!) and beleaguered world. 🙏🏻cv
Clifford :,) You are such a delight—I’m always excited to read your thoughts. Thank you for the generosity of your kindness. I’m thinking I might set up new publications within my substack fro diary, poetry, and culture writing so it’s not quite so eclectic. Thoughts?
Let me give this some thought. I just began a new 30 day regime of blood thinners yesterday, and they seem to be making me foggy and groggy. Just let me repeat here how much I enjoy your writings. I don’t always find my thoughts in lockstep agreement with yours, but I always find the workings of your mind to be engaging and thought provoking. You are a gifted writer, agile thinker, with a broad range of interests, and a force to be reckoned with on the page. Probably off the page too, at least when the weight of the collective bullshit hasn’t knocked you onto the mat. It comes with the territory to sensitive souls. I know. This sentence from Emerson’s letter to Walt Whitman upon reading the first edition (1855) of “Leaves of Grass” captures my thoughts well:
“I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere for such a start.”