The Puzzle

It's just gone 4:00, and already the light has become the deep yellow of the setting sun and outside the shadows have grown long and I'm ready to light my lamps.  Last night it smelled like winter, sharp like burning wood and something undefinable, but cold.  I have ten days left before my self-imposed 'start to write by' deadline for my thesis.  I have thoughts, ideas, and notes.  I think, in fact, I might have the tiniest spark of a real argument, a good one, that fits with current scholarship.  Regardless, I'm falling in love with my subject, and each poem is beginning to stir within me, and the words are beautiful and full.  I want to memorize these poems, but I'm not sure if that will help with my 'thinking' about them 'critically,' but I like hearing the words on my lips and I want them on my heart.  I like the idea of words written on my heart, and it recalls the idea of the surface upon which the words are/were actually written, and that's what I want to write about.  The surfaces they appear on, the surfaces they reference, these everyday things that-- in some cases literally-- balloon into larger cultural references, movements, and ideas.  I want to hold a marble with a poem upon it.  I want to find out every green umbrella under which lovers could press close together.  I want to try turtle soup and I want to blow bubbles like hot air balloons as the stars whirl overhead.  I want to write figures on a slate.  I want to understand how the physical world we live in directs our thoughts and makes meaning in ways so subtle that we might not actually understand that it is our very materiality that instructs our thoughts.  I also want to acquire the proper vocabulary to explain myself, and I want to figure out to synthesize all of this into distinct chapters with pieces of arguments.  The past two major papers that I've written have, to some extent, felt like pulling teeth because I've noticed how constructed they are, how I am weaving out of the air and into so many pixels and processors a kind of overall order, and it has scared me to see myself constructing in this way, and sometimes all I want is a tangible product at the end.  It felt like putting together a puzzle wrong, as if I've mixed too many boxes together or forced things to fit that almost do but don't quite.  So I'm hoping that by taking the time to find all of the pieces, or at least most of them, I can build my borders, and fill in the middle, and if at the end I'm still missing bits I can go and find them out, and I hope that sooner than seems possible I will have made something beautiful, and at least in this metaphor I can hold my thoughts like puzzle pieces in my hand.