Delving into the unconscious with a Typewriter.
The writing machine guides me down the dark path.
I’m sitting quietly. A creek runs beside the patio, where I’ve set myself down in front of the typewriter. Seven years ago.
After allowing the prose to free flow for three days, I’ve come upon a memory. No, I’ve tumbled into a memory, viscerally.
An old friend, a colleague from graduate school, that walked out into the ocean, leaving a pregnant wife behind. He’d been on anti depressants, and they destroyed his life.
What startled me, when I heard the tale, was that he went into the water with all of his clothes on. Such a tender face, I recall. Seraphic, with a faint beard.
After typing for days about the upcoming birth of my daughter, my mind began to trace the corridors of the past, to uproot lost memories. The memory of Brad came to mind.
All I could think, much to my surprise, were of his bones in the ocean. The tender creek running beside me as I wrote, in fits of fury. Something white down by the waterside. His sneakers, one lying on its side? Briny water pouring out.
No, no. They couldn’t be his shoes. Could they? We’re miles from the ocean. No, a cluster of flowers. How the mind plays tricks!
The 1946 Smith Corona Silent obeys: has never lagged. I get up to rapturous highs, speeds commensurate with years of experience, and also with the flood of inspiration.
I believe that the choice of tool was responsible for this venture into the unknown: almost into the realms of the unconscious. Such a dangerous dance.
I hadn’t thought of him since graduate school, actually. His wife was a sublime beauty, and he was such a tender, new soul. First time those feet have set foot upon the Earth, I thought. That’s a certainty.
The creek runs to the ocean. Every bone winds up there, brayed into powders. The thoraxes of crustaceans. The jaw bone. Where he almost hit me once. And then somehow we’re re-born out of the ocean, salinity of the blood the same as the Pacific.
Everything threaded together.
Rip yourself outside of linear time, into the beauty, depth, and richness that is carried in your very bones. Every cell is a wide open eye.
He was buried in the ocean, without ritual, without decorum, under the auspices of a still night. I needed to go meet him before my daughter was born out of the ocean of the womb. Suddenly, from out of the haze of years without a schedule, an urgant errand.
His hand reached up from the depths, and I felt it graze my forearm. A howl broke through my lips, and it wasn’t my own voice.
Keep writing, I thought. We, this body and I, we’re on a mission.
Pages stacking beside the machine, me beside myself. Everything in ruin and coming together.
Write on.
Steven Budden