The problem with writing isn’t what to say but the reverse.
Every topic is a Pandora’s Box with seemingly endless parenthetical statements, or footnotes, waiting to be attached.*
It might be easier to write in 3 dimensions, with tangential points affixed in a more direct and less tedious manner.**
Of course there’s always editing.
But then the twisted-form-that-is-the-beauty-of-the-bonsai-tree is lost.
The form of a thing, its constraints, helps define its beauty - note the Sonnet or Haiku.
As my father would say, “it’s like life itself.”***
And in this case, he may be right.****
*Miles Davis is said to have mentored a young and talented but overly prolific George Benson:
“Ever feel like you could play anything at any time?”
“Yes.”
“Now don’t.”
**Come to think of it, a 3-D story sounds kinda cool – each line or individual thought, typed, cut and shellacked onto a dowel, with adjoining thoughts attached at varying angles, like the branches of a tree - they could be handwritten, or expressed with images, or notes of music! Hmm…
***Yet another of my father’s seemingly throw-away but perhaps deeply ironic lines -Could be an inane and nasally intoned, “plastics, my boy, plastics!” or it could be more like Voltaire’s Candide with “it is the best of possible worlds!”
****Not that D.O.D. aka "Dear Old Dad" is oft wrong, but, the finite span of one’s own life - book-ended by oblivion – what could be more beautiful, terrible and poignant? : )
