Maxine Groffsky talks too much and I hear too little from any of you, but the kettle’s on. In my head one time we made a career of it like Jean-Paul & Simone and everyone had weathervane opinions on the winds of influence but I still only knew either of us like I know her: through words, choice. She edited her own interview, for chrissake. The limits of imagination are four words that could title a book it’d take an eye blink to read, but most poetry would say a lifetime, and take it. Lifetime, you decide.

Take words out of your stories, you’d say, and stop trying to write yourself away. Stop trying to hide something and pretend it’s essence, stop trying to say what it’s all about. I’d know what you meant, having recently finished a little something by di Benedetto I felt I was supposed to appreciate but didn’t, partly because it was just too austere. Laferrière said “there’s nothing more false than real life” and it’s convenient for me to agree right now. Imagine how much freer we’d be in speech if we weren’t so compelled to riddle. I wonder if the pictures taken by strangers contain some message to me. What might they be trying to say?

I fill in the blanks, because I have a way of thinking I tend to say too little and a corresponding way of making up for it. On my own, ironically. When I was younger I called this “research” and spent time at prestigious institutions full of people I could keep away from, filling my head with others’ ideas of how to appropriately tangle with this great mad web of overfunctioning desires, dreaming of wholeness like it was a bill a real person might fit but everywhere seeing only pieces to emulate, and excelling at making lists, but having a hard time knowing what to redact.

Some things never change. Dreams, speech, others, and what of reality. Imagine the simple joy of dreaming without hope, in spite of what you know, finding meaning in letting meaning be, longing, but no longer longing to escape the in-betweens, no longer conflating satisfaction with complacency the way we often mix authenticity with originality. Borges called originality a modern superstition. Of course he would, and when I read that it felt like Satie’s No. 1, if you can imagine, easy and free, comfortable with distances. And I had nothing more to add, no answers, no replies, no noise. What would you say to that, anyone?

Originally published on Hijacked Amygdala.