For many years my head was filled with noise, a relentless and maddening disharmony that rarely went away. In times of action and engagement, it was filled with alternatives to whatever was going on at the time, innumerable “what ifs” and “how abouts”. In less active moments, it would become even more demanding, asking me to prognosticate through “what wills” and “how coulds”.
Some days would be worse than others as my mind threw up terrifying scenarios designed to defeat its own ability to escape them. If I ever felt I was getting a torturous dilemma in perspective, some new wrinkle would appear as a way of tightening the screws on me. My dreams, mostly nightmares when I was younger, would continue to build elaborate traps designed, it seemed, to distract and destroy any hope I had for calm.
For a long time I thought it was all driven by a deep streak of self-destruction. I assumed my physical end would be the self-inflicted conclusion to this deranging symphony. It often felt like having a large number of spinning demons on my shoulders, collectively driving me to an abyss as each insisted a particular viewpoint was the right one. Even my own viewpoint was not static as, being aware that all voices were mine, I frequently inhabited and leapt between the dancing dervishes.
But we are creatures of assimilation, ever ready to hold incompatible or multiple impossible ideas in our head at the same time, exposing the fact that we are all a little bit white queen. Of course, such an assimilating structure is fractured by nature and it causes me to view the world as through a prism. I find oddity more engaging than the lead, subtext more intriguing than text. I am drawn to dichotomies, especially opposing ones, and thing seem more right when they are a little bit wrong.
This disharmony pervades all my thinking and writing. I like to bring disparate ideas together and weave a pattern through them. Subtext that threatens the very structure of the text is too enticing for me to leave out. I am almost unable to say anything that cannot be misread. Sentences feel half baked, incomplete if they have mono-meaning. If I write about someone, I must threaten my own critique, often through irony as I use the tone of the piece to ape or characterize my subject. If I write about Christopher Hitchens, I adopt a blustering and elitest mien. If I write about Alan Dershowitz, I use twisted logic.
Any topic I look at must be viewed askew. It is not that I have trouble seeing the standard through-line, it just holds my interest less. I prefer to look at the off-notes and reflections, quite probably because it fluffs my vanity as though I am saying “look how clever I am, I see this”. Likewise, I can’t help but choose the alliterative to the plain. Hemingway’s terse prose is admirable but not for emulation. Nothing I feel can be worth saying unless it has some poesy.
