Starting is demeaning. The last thing I want to do is pretend I know what I'm doing - to entertain fantasies of leaving my job and writing for any kind of living or fashionable hobby. It feels so bad when it starts out. If you take things as seriously as I do, whatever you try writing about will dig its heels into the ground, and it will not budge. Anxiety about important things has a way of squeezing the rind of the mind like juice, forcing the writer to turn to some desperate plucking and hair-tearing.
The worst thing is the prelim sticky minded-ness about yourself and things you’ll need to do or be. Trivialities get more talkative. I gloss through the ghosts of Tinder dates past, like Gabriel, who humidified my room with boar sweat and skin, watermarks at 6am. Or Irene, who I bet still likes me. I forgot to clean the bathroom. I wonder what’s for dinner? There isn’t enough sunlight, here. Get up, walk away, sit back down, get up, delete, delete, delete… Everything is stupid.
Writing is image-based, but images are hard to see when the mind is so tightened by other things - i.e. anxiety about the audience, anxiety about being “good” or getting “better”, anxiety in general, complaining. My shirt is too tight, my stomach too round, this cafe: too hot. I am too privileged to think of what is hard and true.
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The writing feels uninspired and useless, dissenting and dishonest. The same ideas crop up over and over as you pinch the corners, searching to shape an approximate rightness, only to have them crash through hurdles, thrifted and ashamed. So, you start again. It is this very beginning, the running around, curb-stomping mushrooms, hanging with tight arms from trees for no reason, scoping out the landscape, swinging swords at coconuts - this shaping of and flirting with ideas makes writing unbearable. EVERYTHING sounds STUPID.
Sort of like the dumbness you feel when you look back at journal entries, in that the heat of the distorted thing that inspires a journal entry feels tepid the next day, dramatic and overbearing, just because you didn’t get it right. In the beginnings of writing such a moment or darkness or event, the important parts are skinned alive. With regard to memory: how horrible it is, that a series of moments so talented in their own right could be turned to junk by their father’s own hand! The jarring quality of the whole mess is so distilled, marked by hesitance… The writing and framing of the memory feels so important to get right that it incapacitates you - small Writer - leaving you crawling and capturing all over the page like butterflies; capitals, scrapes, and shapes leaving redness until you open this same page the next day and it looks............worse, despite all the work. Ink can be terrifying in this way. Giving life and tenderness to a moment means, at first, taking some tenderness out of the moment itself, as it quickly becomes evident that language can be blocking, twisting fingers until it hurts to write it.
What we try to write can feel so big: moments so marred by anger, ambition, the dark or light, that they are almost unexplainable. Looking back, we cringe at these bumbling and hastened truths feeling like lies because of how poorly the ink contains the images, how immature those feelings and pictures are in contrast to what we are living now. If a moment or idea is rich and gorgeous, it is, without a doubt, denser and harder to find. The details together are confusing, especially when the moment is peopled - those wooly spirals of hair and teeth.
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Case in point: it is very hard to write. I'm standing here pulverized, breaking into my own hands. This is when the shift really happens, I think—when you’ve either given up or looked somewhere else for so long that you forget you’ve been looking. You loosen up a little, and can think of your writing as an aside rather than an enormous goal. I’ll get up to wash my dishes, and the act of putting sponge to blue china-plate and the soap lather on my hands makes me forget about the writing. The words come easier after putting a hole in the wall. Less caring (after the fact of having cared too much) promotes this one-mindedness about the work, and a voice stronger than the others before it. With some sense of trepidation (you can hardly believe it’s happening), ink starts its work, finally, the deadness inspiring some trail of divinity that pulls the moment through the ink itself...
FLOW!
She, with green fingers and long nails, turns the original idea away from itself, or springs like a secret from it, into a script transformed.
It wonders on its own, the ink. Roving and pushing up on the delicate spots of the arc, moving everything...
This is what I’ve been waiting for.
Once I’ve done all I can by way of deepening and excavation, there is the moment that ink becomes
TERRIFYING,
no longer floating, wispy, or escapable like it was as thought or impulse.
The feeling is like hitting one of those boingo gophers in the arcade game with the hammer and the lights, only you’re hitting the gophers consecutively and are starting to feel like a real winner (even if you paid more for the tickets than you get for the prize.) Really, the pen to paper and the flow and altogether baseless difficulty of writing become the jewelry of the idea, the torch to the light, a thrust of time brought to life in the present thus past, and writ to join us in this open, gaping, breathless of right now, until it passes and passes and your ink of photo, painting, or gasping runs on. The ink pulls some strings from the bottom-up (where the bottom is your chest and the top is right behind the eyes) and has its own resurgence, a shimmer around the edges, DRIPPING! Ornate and delicious, real, or sometimes more simple than you thought, though still page-turning, like basil on a steak, cereal and sugar milk, or butter by itself— in all sorts of ways, I mean, opening up. Making that moment or the moment making itself, turning ink into something digestible, or indigestible, keeping the writer or reader up at night with the fear of it.
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The ink comes to life when you hack at it until the shelling is all over the ground, in a place of pure one-mindedness and - I’m starting to forget, so strong I am with the spirit of it. It’s balancing on an edge, really. Time stops, and we all know that tunnel vision, thoughts from train smoke to calculated gradations, popping into place like spines. The coconut insides will need a little digging, still, to get to the milk of the matter, but it's easier now, because you can feel shiftings in the ink that bring themselves, slowly, to the surface, and this ink of living and flowing —
it WRITES ITSELF!
The ink IS the very memory or thing or person you know and care and feel so much, incarnate in noodles and sparks catching up, and the writing is not so much a labor, but more a *seeing* —not unfolding, but cracking, an egg sloppy into ink.
It's as if you were pulling a donkey cart through the desert with your bare hands because the donkey won't move. That is, the moment is relentless in its stolid “unbecoming". Blisters are in the sun itself and the air is still. But at a point, the donkey becomes fed up with how nauseous you’ve become, how shapeless and stupid you are in your hesitance, and runs with his knobby knees against the wind, dragging you and the whole donkey cart away through the sand and suddenly — open water.
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