The small girl stared at the scolding woman, gradient of seventy-five degrees. The small, but bigger than the girl, boy stood to a side. The woman turned, too quickly for the boy to change his expression or disappear. He looked at the floor, sideways at the girl, as words poured on him, as if spouted by a generous mouth offering potable water, without cease, in an old French town. The little girl stuck a thumb against each nostril and flapped her hands at him. He frowned and earned a louder barrage, without punctuation, commas periods falling away. Now the woman turned this way, now she turned the other way, and the children exchanged grimaces and tongues out and waggling fingers. At last, the woman stopped, waved her hands threateningly, then uttered a brief phrase, and walked out. The children dived under the bed, and poked and squabbled and laughed. The woman returned. The children fell silent. “Where are you?” the woman asked, and started scolding again. The girl rolled her eyes and made a face. The boy tickled her. She started shaking with laughter, soundlessly, and watching her, he started giggling, soundlessly as well. “Idiots,” the woman said very loudly and left again. The two children continued to giggle in silent spasms until one coughed up a drop of bile. And then they laughed out loud. For many years.
         Hmmm….
         Laughing out loud, real, unaffected – no irony, no falseness – laughing-out-loud is among the most ecstatic experiences of being alive. So should I, could I, how should I write LOL prose? I find this a hard question (as in, the answer is not obvious) and a difficult question (as in, this question is likely to require looking blankly at a dead end, in other words, inadequacy). Most often, what makes me laugh out loud is self-shiftingly vulgar irony, and so I fluctuate – though with very little shifting, of self, or anything else – between mumbling internally, “I can’t write that kind of prose” (as in, I’m not a comedian, which, I tell myself, is a non-literary figure, for the most part), and mumbling, perhaps externally, “I can’t write that kind of prose” (as in, I’m not clever enough to write that kind of prose, especially since prose means restricting my palette for vulgar irony to one medium, words; in other words, no sound, no smell, no grimace, no gesture, no pokes, no mirror neurons, no palpable, malleable time, or,  if any of these, just a little, a blotch, a line, in very limited registers).
         If I could draw, like Nicole Hollander, for example, this’d be a different story.
         (or) Perhaps not.
​         Emojis help.

         We don’t have what Narcissus wrote, even if only in his mind, so we are left with mocking his self-absorption.
         As a writer, I am narcissistic, necessarily so; perhaps this is true about all artists. I’m writing this post because, in making my shift from clandestine writer to “I am a writer,” I unwittingly swept away the cover my brave secrecy provided for my narcissism. So I’m getting used to bald, bold, narcissism, though a mild shame and disorientation continue since, before “I am a writer,” I was a dialogue practitioner for many years. I am still a dialogue practitioner, but that’s the muted role now, as I veil and bound the practicality and radical non-narcissism of a good dialogue practitioner’s action-in-the-world.
         The narcissism of writing was not a conscious choice for me, there was no scheduled moment of “time to look at my face, my self.” Rather, I became aware of this self-regard in grand moments of seeing the world: through myself, in myself, and, of course, myself in the world. These are divine, Bhagvad Gita-esque moments, Whitman-esque moments. Depending on the writer, these moments may or may not have tints of self-consciousness, may or may not have magnificent bursts of megalomania, may or may not implode into despair at the banality and limitations of human being.
         I’ve come to realize that, as writers, we look into a mirror; and we ourselves are a mirror. We don’t just look at our, and others’, best features, from the best angles, in the best light, but we look at that greying hair on a granular mole in the shadow of a nostril, and write about that. The beauty, from the best angles, yes, but also the mole.
       This then is my movement – perhaps an oscillation more than a one-directional plunge – from the radical non-narcissism of the dialogue practitioner to the living narcissism, at best the wholeness, the mole-y, whole-y narcissism of a writer.

         Traditionally, the Moirae, more commonly known as the Fates, were imagined as old. They spun the stories of the world to come, each story fresh, even if not new. Today, when, grey-haired, I begin my official writing career, I find myself wondering how someone will describe the stories I spin. If I were a young author, the phrase “fresh, young voice” would spill out easily, if tritely. They, whoever they are, can’t use “young” with me, so perhaps they can say “fresh, new voice” – too glib, and redundant.
         I hope they wouldn’t say “tired, old voice” though “tired” is an underrated quality. If it didn’t have the grey tinge it does in today’s cultures of positive energy, I would claim it proudly. Tired means worked, and worked means stories can come from all those elements of my being that have been active – my fingers, my feet, my womb, my brain, the neurons in my gut, the ineffables of my heart. But I am too afraid to call my stories “tired, old stories,” and I don’t want them to either, because they won’t understand “tired” as I do (the “tired” of my mother who woke up at four, you know the story; the “tired” of the man who cycles 10 miles (to work) before dawn and (home) at dusk each day, which you think you know but most of you, most of us, don’t really, not in the degeneration of our flesh, the worry in our gut).
         So, now, when I google Moirae, I find many drawings of prepubescent spinners. And, indeed, they too spin the stories of the world to come, each story fresh, even if not new. Moirae are the form of original storytelling, the story constructing the Moira, whatever her age (and gender?). This thought leads me to a happy new phrase, “fresh, old voice” that describes the Moirae of old and the parts of their tattered mantles I want to wrap around my name before it spouts its stories at you.