Streaming consciousness into language can be like recollecting the plot of a dream. Details are filled in. Feelings cannot be explained. The actual experience in all its glory of being a human being does not transmit. When I write in stream of consciousness, I quiet myself enough to hear the inner monologue, and then follow the thoughts. I am not a writer. I am a stenographer of background noise. When it is all done, I often have piles upon piles: of appendices to books that will never be finished, of forewords to novels that will never see first edition, and of epilogues, and prologues, and everything in between. None of it coheres, however. I am an organizational disaster. My problem isn’t the initial strike. It’s the Katrina response, let’s call it. When words hit they come in torrents, and there is a overflow of their stream.They lap over the levees, and flood my reality. I am destroyed for the time being. Then I ruin the efforts to remake in the wake of the wake. Around me is death and melodrama and crime and atrocity, and it is all a part of me. Parts of me are gone forever. I will never be the same again. Still – say it again, cliche though it is. I will never be the same again. Writing is that close to a malady for me. In the name of words, I break my beloved’s trust as I break your levees, too. I, the speaker, extend my comparisons, until they are conceits so baroque that they make me sound more conceited than I am. Here I lie, beneath a blanket of didactic pieces, waiting to feel dreams, not word them.
