Rough Theory

The other day, I received an out-of-the-blue apology from a friend. This deeply confused me, as I had no idea what had given them the impression they needed to apologise. I eventually worked out that they had passed by me on the street, said something to me, and I had walked past without acknowledging them – and that they had interpreted this as a deliberate act, and then tried to work out what they might have done, to cause me to treat them so badly.

This morning, I have had three separate people finally manage to attract my attention while I was working in a coffee shop. Two were able to do so only by grabbing my shoulder and shaking me. The third had to tolerate my staring at them blankly for several seconds while I tried to remember who they were (which, in context, was quite a ridiculous thing for me to need to do).

The moral of these little anecdotes is: I am spending an enormous amount of my time at the moment in another world entirely. My body may in fact be wandering aimlessly down the street, or enjoying a cup of coffee, or doing whatever it is that bodies do when their Cartesian counterpart has drifted away, but I am, unfortunately, utterly and completely oblivious to pretty much everything going on around me at the moment because, whether or not I physically look like I am writing or revising, I am writing or revising. I might look like I’m staring directly at you on the street, but all that I am actually seeing are awkward turns of phrase that I want to correct. I might appear to be smiling at you in a coffee shop, but what I am actually doing is grimacing at painful holes in my own logic… At the moment, my gaze is directed almost entirely inwardly, and I am much more than oblivious to whatever else is going on around…

At some point – hopefully soon – some of this writing will start spilling out here again. The kind of writing I am doing at the moment, involves a lot of recasting of earlier sections as later ones fall into form. Since much of what I’m recasting has already gone up on the blog in various forms, it seems at best impolite to inflict very rough interim redrafts on readers here. So I’ll wait until I have something like a complete rough redraft, and then toss the whole thing up for feedback prior to the next round of revision.

Back to oblivion now…