As I Chip Away at the Writer's Block

 I am now deeply imbedded in a writer's block. It is, if you've never seen one, a large cube, large enough for me to fit into its center, consisting of anti-thought. Think of a block of amber in which is suspended a frustrated writer, motionless, seemingly floating, maybe poised to write--knees bent, right arm raised, elbow bent, thumb and forefinger not quite touching, like God and Adam's fingers in Michelangelo's painting, only there is no spark jumping between them. There is no cloud, no attending cherubim. Just me, frozen in mid-thought. Or pre-thought. Maybe post-thought.  It doesn't matter. 

OK.  That paragraph wasn't so bad. The frozen thing, that's good. And the amber reference. In any one instant of time, there is no thought. That's the whole point. Thought is what you make of the difference between one instant of time and the next.  Everything seems sort of timeless now, which is what it feels like when there is no difference from one moment to the next, one hour to the next, one day, one week, one month. 

Time travel is such a seductive idea. It's built into my (WIP) novel's conceit. What a cop out. But I get a kick out of it, and of all the different rules for time travel that each author dreams up. You can't meet yourself. You can meet yourself. You mustn't change anything in the past; it's OK to change certain small things. Your "present time" may or may not be the result of something you do while in the past. In Stephen King's time travel novel, the rule was, you walked through the portal always to the same date and time, and when you returned, and then went through again, everything re-sets. Well, it was necessary for his plot to work. 

It is seductive because, I think, there is nothing that would seem quite so dissociative as being in another "time." At this very moment, I happen to be sitting in my living room with my laptop on my lap (I know, weird, eh?) and a half full coffee cup on the sofa arm next to me. The rising sun is throwing warm light into the room, through the east-facing windows and onto the carpet and the hearth and the balusters of the stairway. There is a clock on the mantle that is ticking loudly. All I have to do now is imagine that I am from the future, or, say, from the past, sent here for some mission.  Or just for the hell of it. Back home, the machine broke and I'm stuck here. No big deal. I'm still alive, and, really, I can't take any of this stuff, the grub worms in the lawn that need my attention, the nagging tax considerations of removing money from the IRA, the politics in the news--I can't take any of it too seriously. I'm just a visitor. Like I'm on vacation but my Subaru wagon broke down. Oh well.