The melancholic sink.

i’m tutoring in a second grade class. Math. Those of you know me well can pick yourselves up off the floor. The students are practicing addition + subtraction of 2 digit numbers.

For the visual types, e.g. 57+87=S

A girl in the class quoted me, from when i was her age,
I don't understand where the numbers come from! All caps.

The frustration in her face told me what she was thinking...
She surmised that math had the incarcerated feeling of a straight jacket. There were 9 digits plus 0 to work w/. Only one barbaric correct way. One piss-correct sum for any given problem. We call them problems, don’t we?

Well, she may not have thought these things, exactly. i may have been reading into her furrowed brow.

i wanted to tell her, Don’t worry you’ll probably excel in the literary arts. With the English language you have 26 letters combined in legions of ways. There’s even room to create new words. Plus lots of punctuation. You will meander through, history, mystery,  fiction, auto + biographies, historical fiction, fantasy, science fiction, poetry, nonfiction, fables, fairy tales, myths, reference ... but the bell rang + she had to git.

Deep work w/out being complicated.

Sometimes i continue to read something i can’t understand on to the end, hoping that by the time i’ve pushed through to the finish a grand flash will blind me into understanding in a total holistic way.

Reading on + on without recess to get it is like listening to a lecture w/out a teacher pausing for the students to digest information.

+ so, i am existing in this life lecture w/out pause. One page ahead of comprehension confidently hoping it will kick in.

There is sometimes a greater judgment shown in deviating from the rules of art, than in adhering to them; and ... there is more beauty in the works of a great genius who is ignorant of all the rules of art, than in the works of a little genius, who not only knows but scrupulously observes them.  -Joseph Addison - in The Spectator in 1714.

Peering into random journals, it occurs that it doesn't matter in what order a life is written down in a book. Linear prospects make no sense once you begin to see cycles + loops + back lashes. When meeting someone it’s not on the terms of tell me everything that has ever happened to you since your birth, you can’t skip phases and you can’t go back to fill in. Getting to know someone IS much like filling in. A first impression may lay down the bare bones of a tentative sketch. Some areas remain empty for quite some time, + then, in a flash those blank spaces become rich w/ layers of kindred experiences in explicit detail.

Cartoons don’t grow older, they just change their clothes.  -ANHH