StrangeJournal.com

The trouble with being me is that everything is meaningful. That might sounds fun, a kind of mystical place where each thing I posses and every moment I experience is suffused with a kind of mystical potential that diffuses slowly into the fabric of my existence each time I reach out and touch them. This is not, in fact, the case. The case is that every moment is, in some way or another, a moral referrendum on how I’m living my life. Writing, the most embattled and in some ways important, piece of my life, is no different except in its extreme.

I can write with one hand tied behind my back, but I am not pushed, not drawn, not compelled to do it. At least, not in a productive way. Perhaps I am in purgatory, neither in possession of, or in the possession of my demons; still close enough to them to hear their taunts from behind me, but not far enough away from them that I can see them for the angels that they are, the angels who, with proper application of the magic word (the secret name of God perhaps, or my own true name, revealed to me by an as yet unmet master, or maybe discovered in a moment of ecstatic metaphysical transparency), will do my bidding, carrying me up to heaven for wordless dialogue with god, speaking with only our souls, engaged, as he did with Israel, in physical combat of the spirit.

This is, I hope, a statement of the mental health, the emotional strength which I have been hoarding, scraping together every day like drops of water for a thirsty man, except that the thirst is really ennui, distaste for the situation I find myself in. But I am afraid it is not, that any progress I have made is an illusion, that I am no further from the taunts of said demons than I was a year ago, or three. I know that it can’t be true. I am healthier in the rest of my life than I ever have been, taking care of myself emotionally and physically, with a steady kind of compassion that, five years ago, I wasn’t even aware was possible, much less was capable of practicing. And yet, here I sit, whinging about how I don’t have the drive to write.

This is, ultimately, the same old lament: talented but not driven, prepared but not passionate. The trick, though, in the transfiguration of fallible humanity into true self-loathing is to take that lack of passion and turn it so that its presence is proof of my lack of special status. I am not favored in the eyes of God because the single thing that I am good at, that matters above and beyond getting it done or just getting by, seems to have somehow sputtered out over the last 8 years and I haven’t, in all my wit and wisdom, been able to find a way to consistently rekindle it. This lack of passion is a failure on my part, and that failure is a stain on my otherwise spotless (haha) resume.

I wish I could just get up and write everyday: carrying water, chopping wood. And yet the simplicity, the rote-mindedness of that somehow robs it of its significance. If writing is just a daily chore, then why do it at all? I am in the middle of the specialness conundrum: How can something be special if I do it everyday? Even, especially, when I don’t want to do it? Why do I do something if it’s something that I don’t want to do? And again, the reflection of myself against some perfect pursuit, such as mastery of writing, or perhaps even more grandly, mastery of myself, that I am not hero enough to endure, to withstand, to triumph over.

It is a measure of my ability to subtly and consistently undermine myself, wordlessly rob myself of efficacy, allowing my doubt to dissolve my certainty every morning, waking up myself again, powerless without some external advocacy, some outside agent to draw me forward into motion. Without the threat of deadline or disappointment I am difficult to motivate, and that speaks to me of blockage: dysfunction or dis-ease or some sort or another, but no spiritual practice or god that I have sought have been able to diagnose or dispel it. So I am left with myself and my sneaking suspicion that it is my lack of piety or endurance that is at fault, my inability to transcend the mortal plane and pierce into the godhead and encounter the divine (and thus somehow lend validation to my being, my thoughts, experiences and fruit of loom and loin); left with these blunt tools whose unsubtle blows I rain down on the unforgiving surface of my life in seemingly fruitless attempt to shape it to my liking; left with this clumsy likeness, a crude homunculus whose ugliness drives me to distraction rather than to perfection.

And I know that there is no shortage of perfectionism in this paralysis. That I am obsessed with knowing the outcome before I even begin the endeavor, and I know that kind of certainty has no place creativity, that the heart of productivity lies imperfection, and that in order to achieve the beauty I seek, in my life or in my work, the key is revision. But can you blame me if that doesn’t excite me? If slavish rewriting of my life is somehow less than motivating? Probably, I know I can blame myself for anything.

Taking one step back (to find yet one more way to criticize myself) this cannot be fun to read. I imagine that, despite the well-crafted prose and the mildly surprising vocabulary, that the fulminations of a would-be writer at his erstwhile impotence makes for less than engrossing entertainment, especially when that’s all he writes about. I am not sure which is worse: the writer who cannot write, or the writer who only writes about how he cannot write.

 

Categories: daily lit, writing