When the morning voices are silent

“If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.”
― Ray Bradbury

“Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.”
― Ray Bradbury

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WHATEVER THIS IS, it is not a 'dry' spell.  It may be an altered state, like being hit with soft lightning.  Nothing is singed but the circuits seem fried.  Not one thing works the way it did even a few weeks ago; small domestic tasks, creative intentions, simply staying awake, all are beyond my capability.  Do powerful solar flares turn humans, or some of us, into sleepwalkers whose arms and legs have become almost too heavy to lift?  I guess that would produce sleepshufflers.  More accurately, sleepsitters.  Merely considering such a notion probably condemns me to eating lunch at the crop circle table.

Last week I thought I'd caught the end of a thread about a correlation between a lightness of mind - being open and available for enlightenment -  and a perceived greater density of body, slowed movement, reluctant joints, gravity's target demographic.  It would not be shaped into a coherent, familiar form and I thought it needed a new shape, a fresh voice, a reduced self-consciousness to emerge as anything other than half-baked.  It still sits in draft form, abandoned after I tried to force the momentary weightlessness of the entrechat - or an old favorite, jumping as an elevator starts to descend - into a shotgun marriage with the windows (not windmills) of my mind.  An ill-fated union or at least not one for which I had the necessary flair.

I DO stuff myself full of the morsels Mr. Bradbury lists and I know the state of wanting, working to trap what they suggest before anything escapes.   My morning voices feel short on pep, lacking conviction and seem to wonder aloud when they will be allowed to go back to their bed.  It is NOT a dry spell.  It feels more like a too-small house being taken over by too many relatives with boundary issues who didn't bring even the most essential items since they knew they could mooch off me.  I feel like I've been sleeping on the floor of the sunporch, then spending the rest of the day trying to clean the kitchen and not succumb to the vapors, though that would give me an excuse.

Mr. Bradbury, I was certain, would not suffer a whiner nor would he tolerate any excuses.  We are writers, we write.  Since this is what I have in the moment, in keeping with his ethic, this will be what I write today.  I hope tomorrow's morning voices have emerged from their anaesthesia.  I hope my missing parts will be restored.
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"The mere attempt to examine my own confusion would consume volumes."
James Agee