thought 53
It has been too long since I’ve written something without a purpose. I so often used to write just to write, for the joy of it, for the release it provides. I have been in need of a literary injunction.
You see, the incessant fear is that the words will some day (for better or worse) stop pouring from you, so while they do you feel obligated to get them down on paper—or at least to digitally document them, as the case may be. This is what happens when you wrap yourself in the pages of a book for more than seven years: you forget what life was like before the book, putting down a sentence simply because it popped into your head, seemingly conceived without purpose or prethought, conjuring just to conjure, with an uncontrollability that somehow brings you bliss.
I guess that’s what I have been missing: losing myself in the act of writing as a means of pure catharsis, without any specific place toward which you’re directing the expulsion. This is what happens when you give yourself over to something entirely: coming back from it once that mission is gone seems as impossible and strange as surrendering yourself to it in the first place. I have been lost in it, my novel, for so long now that I haven’t figured out yet which way I came in. I didn’t have the forethought to leave any breadcrumbs in my subconscious as I navigated the convoluted path to my former horizons, before the flicker of light called to me from a distance and soon became my greatest obsession—or at least my most belabored one.
So what then does one hope for? The gumption to keep kicking yourself until you stand up from the loosely sculpted pile of your fiction, the psychic energy to will your thoughts back into the abstraction that cultivated all your laborious excretions?
I have been compelled. I have been inspired. I can sense the remnants of those emotions and I know the madness and serenity waiting for me when again I am ready to heed their calls.
And so, for now, this is where I blog my thoughts. Something both banal and sappy for the Digital Age. Welcome to the poet’s new plight. I vow that it won’t last very long.
