Everything emulates the motion of balance. This motion is both vague and ubiquitous. It is the underlying logic of a heartbeat, or a sigh. Oscillation—an ebb and flow from a base state. Motion is the word that sits on top of this oscillation. Oscillation is nuanced. It is physically simple, and metaphyiscally complex.
Frequency is oscillation. Sound, more broadly, is oscillation. I developed a habit of rotating my torso side to side as I stand beneath a shower head, as to hear the water from each ear at an interval. The movement from hunger to satiation, from warm to cold, from wakefulness to sleep—these are all oscillations, and they are all easy to understand. The human body is physical, seemingly indivisible, and it oscillates. It is stimulated by external oscillations called sensory experiences.
Joy is oscillation. Happiness comes, mandated to leave. This is a necessity. Excitement wears away to stagnation. Emotions oscillate. Mental illness may be described at emotions that oscillate either too quickly or too slowly. Discomfort to comfort, despair to hope, mania to malaise. These are difficult to understand with the same rigour by which one may understand physical oscillation. The mind is metaphysical, stimulated by both internal and external oscillations called emotional experiences.
I removed most of my writing from this website. I felt a sort of power in clawing back my words and shoving them into an archive folder. Publication to privation. Inane, I can’t understand it. Insect, I thought, like the repetitive twitchy movements of an insect that seem to have little purpose or direction. I close my eyes, and I see my hand. It reaches out. It seeks something. I’m sure all insects seek something.
If one cannot effectively assess the substance of oscillation, then it reasons to begin with the shape of oscillation. One point in the centre, and two points in the peripheral. The curve between each point is a trajectory, as it is this line which defines the oscillation. The space between the centre and each point is a distance, and this distance isolates the centre from the motion. It reasons, then, that the centre remains motionless, and this allows for the motion of oscillation. The centre is observational, passive. The points are stimulated, active. Oscillation’s shape emanates out. The stilled centre with the periphery in motion is a common configuration. Therefore, to mimic oscillation is to mimic something unknown but ubiquitous.
As a writer, my job is to mimic oscillation. I must play the role of the stilled centred and allow the periphery to oscillate without interruption. Elfriede Jelinek says “if you want to say something, you have to let the language itself say it”. By virtue of my existence, language rotates around me. Language exists without me, certainly, but its orientation relies on me. It is my energy that pulls in certain streams. I am to watch them, and record them. Everything I will write has already been written, it oscillates around me. It is not a question of if I will write something, but when.
Perhaps by this point you have encountered a contradiction: if one is to mimic oscillation and play the role of the stilled centred, does that not suggest that to be a writer is to be passive? The vocation of a writer is to write actively, not watch passively. To return to Jelinek, language speaks as an instrument intones. In both cases, the tool is inert. Without a writer, the language remains unwritten. Without a musician, the instrument remains undisturbed. Yet the writer and the musician simply add what the tool cannot do on its own—the writer writes the language, in the same way that the musician disturbs the instrument. To watch passively is to dedicate attention. The writer directs attention to the oscillation, and by that focus conducts a form of writing within the mind, thereby actively providing language with a body.
My job as a writer has its complexities with regards to oscillation. What oscillates around me is encapsulated by a dense body of melodrama. These melodramatics structure the things I want to say and give them legibility. Melodramatic structures are mundane, lumpy, and dull. They lack aesthetics, focused only on transit—function over form. I play the role of the stilled centre, and I observe and record my melodramatics. I must divine my meaning out, and place it into form. Melodrama is function, writing is formation.
I do have things to say. Until this point, when I have tried to say them, I stood in front of the language and tried to speak for it. When I tried to quiet myself, I still got between what I wanted to say and its form. Things will oscillate regardless of my action. I have no role or responsibility in motion. Therefore, I must remain still, and allow my ideas to grow their own body.