809. slippage

My hand is sore, something I only notice when I write. It is the holding of the pen by which I know it, this pain, know it is not natural, not the aging I see so clearly in the mirror nor some disease of unknown origin. My hand hurts to write and only when I write; otherwise, I feel no pain at all; the hand is, in every way, whole, healthy. The pain, to be clear, is not in the writing or perhaps I should say not in the act of writing, but rather it is in the hand, or more so, in my mind and transferred to the hand. And by this holding of the pen, I know. I am under extreme stress.

What I find most terrifying is not the stress, but that I must know it slant, know it by shadow, know it by degree of act and not of pure consciousness or unhindered awareness. This crass blindness to my own self is what I call slippage. I am aging. Life has found me wanting. In my premature weakness, in this calving of the psyche, I become, under the chisel, the hammer, as so many icebergs. And in this way, I see myself slowly floating away as one might if from shore, from what was whole, the country of oneself. And too, there is this sense that the shards shall never be whole again. One feels one is less than before. That what was there yesterday, is not here today. I suppose there is some correlation to knowledge and memory and the erosion that age imposes on experience. One feels as a book with pages missing, the story fuzzy, the fragments that remain as puzzling as the gaps. Like looking at a dry riverbed and wondering of the water that used to flow, must have coursed, as blood courses, in the living. Something died within me when Cait died. I can feel its weight on what remains. I carry it every day. And to think, I know it by my hand, by writing.

journal entry, John Discovery--written sometime shortly after departure from Polaris