Remiss Already!

     Over the past few days I have been fiddling with all the unimportant parts of the blog - templates, backgrounds, trying to re-size the masthead photograph - instead of doing what I am supposed to, which is writing.  It's startling how difficult it can be to think of something to write, really.  Often something will occur to me during the day, but when I sit down to write the ideas seem to flutter away.  The answer, I imagine, is to write more and write more often, so that any errant thoughts are likely to be caught at one point.
     I really enjoy writing.  As I put up my review up the other day, I was reminded of how much I miss writing.  The work in which I am currently involved doesn't require any real writing, but in previous years of study I wrote constantly, and I am sorry that I no longer make much use of my word processor.  I have been told a few times that I am quite critical. Too critical, even.  But I think that I criticize none so harshly as I do myself.  One might almost say that I make an effort to do so, not only from self-castigation but from the fear of being laxer with myself than with someone else.  In consequence I tend to be retrospectively dissatisfied with my work and sometimes cringe at the errors time and distance permit me to detect.  All the same, I take occasional pleasure in rereading some of what I have written in past years.  And even if I didn't, there is value in writing, or in whatever else, if it pleases me at the moment of action.
     I am seated at my IKEA desk.  To my right are an old jar with a few dessicated dahlias, cut near the end of last fall's bountiful crop, a sprig of pine with two small cones my mother gave me before I returned to school this semester, and two jars, one Colman's Mustard and the other an old spice jar, that hold earth from the two places in which I grew up.  Behind them, attached with small magnets to a steel wire, are postcards.  A king from the Lewis Chess Set stares at me, sword across his knees and eyes bulging from his head; below him, the siege of Jerusalem from the Franks Casket; at the bottom, Richard III in miniature, with his axe and crowned sallet, and Percival Thirwall behind him, bearing aloft the White Boar of Gloucester.  To my left, a banker's lamp, papers, medication, and an orange.  From the computer comes the Chanson de Guillaume.  With the blinds closed, I am severed from the world.  I could be on a spaceship, traversing the immeasurable, frigid void, my housemate's music the repetitive grumbling of the FTL engine.  I suppose that this is one of my retreats; certainly, intrusion is unwelcome, and permission to enter rarely given.  I can do little, really, to keep it sequestered when the world is determined to enter: I can fence myself in, but I cannot forever fence it out.  But few indeed are those whom I have been happy to allow in or whom I have wished were present.  Sadly, I cannot rely on it, or on any of the few other retreats I have.  I suppose the only retreat one has is the castle of one's own mind.  Music, weather, landscape, light, and the many other things people use to help themselves think or relax on their own can prepare the mind, they can soothe it and make it receptive, but in the end they are only trappings.  If the castle's gates are barred, no suppliant may enter, howsoever eloquent or desperate his pleading.  I hope, though, that with effort I can make the door-ward less reluctant to lift the portcullis.