(Unedited)
I just wrote a good story. This one is funny because I knew (hoped) it was coming for a long time, and it broke (abraded?) the a spell of god awful nothing for almost a year on this manuscript which I wanted to call done because I didn’t know what to do with the beast until I knew something else was coming and was thrilled with thought that as opposed to just reclining in repose the thing might have legs and stand. I didn’t know how or why I just kept listening. I kept listening and kept listening and didn’t know what I even was listening for - and then yesterday - after I saw the violin shop with the hanging cellos two days ago it happened it all broke loose and tumbled apart, and yesterday, all day, I felt it coming when I shook apart and phrases fell and I had to record them in my blue notebook and wait wait wait wait wait and every minute was longer than it needed to be and I resented the obligations that kept me from it and I don’t know if the people that saw me yesterday knew I has full of a fever and lost. I had a nice evening, my mind moved like a fast horse, practice laps around the track, how many many furlongs. By the time I arrived home I was shaky and knew. I opened the blue notebook and stared at the two pages of notes and had the moment of reckoning that has to be. I let my mind go blank and I knew the few sentences I knew and I trusted the brain to string the rest together and I did not type it then, I felt it for awhile and had the last minutes of it still inside unformed. Like Christmas Eve. It kept me awake late late late and forget to turn out the light, sitting quiet by myself, and I sat still then slept less than five fingers worth of sleep and my early alarm sounded at the still very dark hour of night that is best for writing and I didn’t understand what the sound was because I hadn’t slept enough to know and thought it was the middle of the day because the light was on and I made a pot of coffee and turned the light off and sat and said this is it and when I started I was rusty. The muscles took a second to remember how the whole thing works. I knew the few good sentences, heard the voice, in an instant understood what had to happen and the way it moved and I heard the voice of it, heard it clearly. I wrote markers on the page to pull me. From how I understood it. I understood first a portion of the beginning and the end, but backwards, so it was dizzy for a second and even more than saying it, I knew to whom this one was said. I watched the clock, used the dark, and raced the sunrise. I wanted to clearly see how long it so I wrote the time I started on the page and then I let it all be said. I heard it was the main thing and stopped thinking and then, two hours and two minutes passed. I read the last words of it, new to me that moment, one sentence past where I imagined it would stop, and I thought how wonderful it is to be able to this. I walked to the big window and leaned against it staring at grey and overcast density of morning. How many times do you get this, as a writer? I understand how little of that moment you get. I understand how much I’d give to stay here, which is to say, everything I would, too. I wanted to understand what happened so I explained it to myself and understood something new about my process. I understood more the process of leaving yourself and coming into yourself at the same time that it takes and can only describe what happened to me in the moment of writing that as splitting the brain in half and making one half leave and one half stay and the half that stays gets to see into a dark hallway that suggests doors and is a room of hearing. The brain of a person that loves could stay in this hallway space forever in this imaginary place. But you can’t, like I said, you don’t get to. I looked back at the words and back at my pages in the notebooks. I’d made a diagram of the word “dissonant” underlines with arrows that self 1 and self 2. I did that yesterday, before I wrote, and I didn’t even know about what I do now. Consciously at least. I thought the story would be about that. It isn’t - it is about hearing! And I want to cry when I understand that I heard a work about hearing and it gave my own hearing back to me when I thought it might have been lost to me and I was sad and then now, not sad. There’s more left, the well not dry, and for a time, I think I will remember how to get to the place.  The story is called “the notion that discharge of primary neurons might be in some way synchronized by an efferent system” and I won’t forget this one. I wrote it for my friend.