Snowglobes

Many thoughts are coming to mind and I don't have any category for them. A sentiment I find intolerable is that of feeling- even seeing- many things and being wholly unable to express them.

What I mean is like being in a snowglobe. A snowglobe filled with flakes of beauty, ugliness, sadness and joy; all sorts of imaginations and fact hopelessly unsettled and unorganized. It's frustrating because, without their categorizations, the whole experience looks very much like having no thoughts at all. That is wildly inaccurate and thus, intolerable.

Merely listing the flakes as they randomly flutter into view is no good either. It feels better to state the tributaries, chart the rivers, and precisely map the geography. I remember without context, C. S. Lewis describing a fondness for creating maps as a child. I have no idea why. I never made up maps of fantasy lands when I was younger, but it does strike me as a very enjoyable thing. There is a deep-seated need to create order, even order in our wildest imaginations. Indeed, within the realm of words, passionate bouts of free-verse lose their edge if not tempered with the wider context of structured expression.

My nearest correlation, and one that I think fits, is found in videogames. As a kid, the games that were finally able to allow 3 dimensional exploration firmly grasped my imagination. The primitive and polygonal worlds the developers created seemed irresistibly mysterious with their invisible boundaries and inaccessible regions that were never meant to be seen but for the accidental breach of a glitch. It was one of the few remaining ways a child of my generation could daily go out and do something that felt like exploration. And perhaps the joy of exploration is similar to making maps of fantasy worlds. It's subduing.

And that, whether subduing the unknown, or the chaotic flakes of the snowglobe, is deeply burned into our humanity. An impulse that once accomplished, craves more. Not in the sense of psychological addiction, but in the natural context of humanity. Just as it is not an addiction to eat dinner after you earlier had lunch.

At any rate, I have been reading and that gives me the feeling of falling when I'm sitting down, like vertigo. Without an original aim, I'm glad that I have let some of my thoughts at least congeal. My prose needs refinement and focus.

Or a snowblower.