A word. What is the next word? Is it of a hand trembling, scavenging from a pond of tears, looking for something which has already been lost? Is it of a heart racing, making poems out of what doctors describe only as an intricate function of a system? What else could be said when everything has been written, only through different perspectives, from hands clinging to thin air to an imaginable rope of hope, or the distress coming from the womb of days. What else…
Envy. Probably I could have died this afternoon reading someone else’s sadly but splendidly wrung lines, someone else’s poetry. Nat had it in her blood, like how tradition inspires generations to cure disease and preserve life. I scorch through her verses, the ones in German, the ones in plain spontaneity. She always had that characteristic nostalgia like her heart exploded with every word. Unrestrained, with depth that can swallow a mountain down from its crest.
And it pained like a knife lodged on a nerve in the neck. I desired to let go, to be snared in by a force above me, more powerful than my grief, but I can’t. I envy. I do out of a lust that has escaped me, an affair I embraced since those days that my hair was being combed, twisted to braids by wrinkled fingers.
And it pained like a knife lodged on a nerve in the neck. I desired to let go, to be snared in by a force above me, more powerful than my grief, but I can’t. I envy. I do out of a lust that has escaped me, an affair I embraced since those days that my hair was being combed, twisted to braids by wrinkled fingers.
I had always believed I was a part of a circle, that which friends venerated with a passion struggling with art since the days of Bonaparte. Nevermind if some people forgot to slip in a little thank you note in their books du jour to those who considered them a part of their universe, a light given praise to in every journal left alive.
But this time I felt certain: I am no longer part of any circle. I would have to strive alone -as in most predicaments- independently, as all “struggling artists” do in the start. I begin from scratch. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
If I even know how to begin in the first place.
I no longer read. I stoppped putting thoughts on paper, started surviving everyday like all ordinary people do. No more foreplay with words, no more art that people need to figure out. Save perhaps, for the art in suffering.
Too many people had told me not to let go of this fire. Several of them teachers making solemn notes in my reflection papers. You have a great gift, they said. God blessed you with compassion and an innate talent for words. Pursue it. Never let go.
As in all instances that my hands go deaf, mute, blind -all-in-all, dead- I can not present any logical reason for it. Maybe it is some preoccupation with things that seem to matter. Maybe I was not born to write. Maybe there’s a nature of possibilities fated other than penning ideas. Maybe I’ve become too old to write. Conversely that’s not even an excuse, moreso a valid fact. Nobody is too old to write. Nobody ages only to forget delicate memories, or to put a gift to extinction, to inanimation.
I stared at a compilation of my writings. There have been many good stories, many trauma and injuries that spawned a beautiful madness of literature. But I can not write that way anymore. From where, when and how, it is always left inexplicable. Left as is, like a reason unjustified but now buried in the cold files section.
Yes, I write of Love almost each time I can. How it destroys me then nourishes me in the end, propelling me closer to the richest human spirit one can transform into. But that’s all I am left to say. Overused, repetitive, unappealing. The water left in a pail a week ago. Untouched, stale and old. Maybe I have put all my eggs in merely one basket that I am unable to go far from it. Far enough to evolve and touch other values that are human. Too close to see what’s out there, beyond the opaque windows of this secret haven. This engagement to my relationship is good, perhaps the one good thing that clothes all my mishaps, but I can’t say too it’s all I can be, and will ever be.
See, I’m turning out ambivalent.
I read once that writing is not about fame or recognition. It’s not about the money. It’s not about prestige and writing so that one can be written about. It’s about a persistent, nagging, torturing need to put word for word on a blank page. I have always written from the heart and nowhere else, but I have lost that need. Most of the time I stare at the oblivion of the night sky, at faces hurrying in streets, at how the rain makes love with every leaf, and I feel a primal urge to regress and stick to what is true, to what I think – and above all, know deep in the well of my heart -is a justification to why I am still breathing every weave of the thread of my existence, but after a second it is swept away with the wind. It becomes only a part of a thousand memories, the ones you can not detour back to and reverse no matter how powerful one’s imagination can be. I have propagated nothingness out of God’s sheer novelty, bore a useless, languid re-creation out of a neatly fixed present.
This drama needs a climax, a denouement, maybe even a moral to it. But even that is too hard to spell.
