No longer panic flight. No longer rush. No longer lost in this and that and this. No longer heart-tremors. No more panicked breaths.
Catching up with ourselves. Pausing. Taking account. Looking back through our notebooks. Resting. Consolidating. Pulling our thoughts together, such as they were.
Reviewing the thought-path we’d taken. Coming to ourselves.
We’d planted the seeds. Now was the time for the Harvest. All our work. Everything we’d written, or tried to write. The papers we’d published.
Now it was time to bring it all together. That was the groundwork, merely. (Sounds better in German: the Grundwerk.) Now it was time to see what we could Do. What would Open, if we were given time. How our work might blossom.
Now that there was light pouring into us. The warmth in us. No that we had time. Now that time was opening to us. Now we were included in time. In the timing of time. In summer time.
Six weeks, without mooring. Six weeks, into the open. Six weeks of summer voyage. Six weeks for the summer wind to catch our sails.
Summer languor. Summer luxuriance. A summer stretching of limbs.
Summer peace. Now we’re out of peril. Out of our mire. Now we’re uncrushed. Unbroken.
Summer thoughts – there are those. Summer ideas. That seem to float upward. That seem to rise into the sky, like fire balloons.
Sometimes becalmed. Sometimes, no wind, nothing happening. Sometimes, the desire to move forward, but no ability to move forward. Sometimes, days spiral into themselves, lost. Sometimes, days just falling into themselves. Collapsing into themselves.
Sometimes, a kind of summer introversion. No summer expansiveness. No summer extraversion. No summer openness. Sociability.
Summer, rising. Summer, buoyant. Rising higher than itself.
Summer, opening summer eyes. In us! In our writing!
Would it buoy us up, too? Would it carry us up with it? Would we stop our sinking? Would we free ourselves of solitude? A warm wind, across our bodies. A zephyr. What was happening? What was growing?
Sometimes, scarcely a direction to time. Time seemed to sink into itself. Time seemed to lie down. There were time pools. Time puddles. Sometimes, time seemed to catch a breeze.
Time, moving forward. Time, pressing into the future. Opening future for itself. But idly, not wilfully. Curiously, not wilfully.
Gesturing. Extending a hand. Testing. Seeing what it could become, the summer. How it could live in us. How it might work through us.
Work – unwork. Undo. Loosen. Let us go, in some sense. Set us free. Free ourselves into … what?
A summer dimension. A summer thickness. A summer cloying. A summer viscosity. Like honey.
Summer thick, like honey. Summer, runny, like honey. Summer you have to spoon out. That dripped slow drips. Rolling drips, down the jar of summer. Was that what we were to write with: summer honey?
Was there a special summer reward for us? Was there something being given to us, as a special summer favour?
The capacity to work. To believe ourselves to be working. A summer confidence. A summer swelling.
Belief in ourselves; was that it? In what we could do?
A summer pride. Was it real? Should it be? Should we feel that way?
Wasn’t it pretence? Wasn’t it obliviousness? Where was our sense of failure now?
Did we really believe that we wouldn’t fail? That summer wouldn’t wreck us?
Summer delusion: was that it? Summer pride before a summer fall ….
Summer made us believe we were geniuses: was that it? That we had summer haloes. That it would come together – everything we were. Everything we’d tried to think. That it would make sense at that moment: the meaning of our lives. The fruit of our lives.
Work in Progress 