Thu, 19 May 2005

swallowed up inside
What of a life is necessary? What are the parts which cannot be removed? What can be pulled off and discarded as habit, as ever-failed potential, as custom and contrivance? This depends on intent and purpose, obviously; any object is the minimal amount of material needed to complete a set task. What is the task before me, then? What can be removed, and what can be expanded, in order to reach that task?

What makes this so difficult is that each attribute is so tightly wound with the others that distinct boundaries are hard to find. So much of what one needs is grafted upon what one does not need. Yet there is so little time, and so much waste in a life, so much running at a thousand things and never reaching any of them. Give up the words, and you give up everything connected to the words, like some knotted nest of roots beneath the skin. It becomes difficult, when following this line of thought to certain ends, not to think we are fundamentally flawed, that the goals set before us are impossible, content to ape out humiliating parodies of the things we aspire to, narrowing the scope of our aspirations to the trivial. I am liked by people I do not care for, and that should mean absolutely nothing to me, certainly in comparison to the people I love, but instead it feeds my pride, suggests second guesses and bad faith, because what am I if I am not well-liked. Then the lies come in, the backtracking, the preening and posturing. I become encrusted with it, growing slower and heavier and more tired until I cannot get out of bed, cannot type out the words, cannot cleanse myself of the stink of shit. But what good is writing, the voice whispers, if no one is there to read it?

I once had an answer to this, when I wrote sheerly for the physical joy of it, for the quickness of the ideas pulled together under my fingers, the lack of forethought from years of practice now leading to a kind of quicksilver simplicity, an economy of motion, which made the very idea of what would come after almost an afterthought. The audience I had then was of one, or two, and I wrote to them in stories as much as in letters. It was all I needed, and it made me happier than I have ever been since, and I cannot compare it to love because it was not fundamentally different. Writing was a self-sufficient machine that ran on the simplest of premises: I love you, let me tell you a story.

There was no fucking internet then. There was no ache in my wrists, and in my stomach, and in the base of my neck. There was no having to imagine some ideal reader that I could write to, no need to think about whether or not this or that idea would be productive, no desperation to do the work, and no endless nights of terror when the work stopped. I cannot stop doing this, because even when I stop it does not go away, and because I have absolutely nothing to replace it with. If this was my goal, then I have mutated over time into a form which hinders pursuit of the goal, creates difficulties as distractions. I am convinced that I can get back to a place by walking away from it, no matter the logical flaws in such an argument.

Who am I talking to?
(12:25.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #