once all over again

"The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair." 


- Walker Percy. The Moviegoer.

I find it funny how people consider me a writer.  And perhaps this reveals something very deep and silly and telling about the quirks in my soul.

Because I do love writing.  When I can do it.  That's the thing.  Writing is both the most lovely and the most painful thing in the world.  Somewhere between the place where writing was my one escape, my one way to create beauty in a very distasteful life spot (place 1); and the place where somehow "I am a writer" and it's what I do on "cue" (ha) and "it defines my core" and whatever else I've thrown out there about it to the point where yes, it is my job (place 2) - somewhere along there it stopped being fun, spontaneous, and even meaningful.  And yet, this should be the best time of my life for it.

My aversion to writing has plagued me for the last four years when I walked off a stage with my first diploma.  I've diagnosed it to lots of things.  I write to many friends online, and that satisfies all the wit-releasing I need on paper for the day.  I'm more vocal than I used to be.  I was stuck in two horrid jobs for half of the last four years, and that sucked me into a survival mode which should have made run to my journal more.  But somehow poking at the pain with a pen made it throb even more. I have about 3 journals started and abandoned, with each entry beginning or middling out with "these words are not right . . . my pen doesn't follow my heart. . . it isn't even quite this way."

And maybe that's where the true answer lies.  Because writing demands that you be honest, brutally honest, about who you are and what is going on in and around you.  It makes you a dealer with truth.  Even when you start out not know what that truth is, it puts you a quest among the quarrelsome members of your own soul on a path unseen.

It leaves you utterly dissatisfied if you haven't reached that truth by the time you finish, or if you know - as you always know - if you lack a good light within you as you tread through the mire of jumbled thought.   It makes you work through issues, pull together thoughts that are much more comfortable when untouched and scattered.  The nag to write bugs you all the stronger the more you dig in heels and resist.

For what more is writing than knowing created reality (and its Creator) and turning within and crying out what you've known with your own spark?  In the beginning there was the Word - now that Word is here with us, and He gives our odd ramblings a greater weight and truth than we ourselves realize.

And that is the ultimate tug: entering into oneself with enough honesty to say the word, your connection with what is most meaningful and true, with conviction.  It comes down to your voice; for writing absolutely demands that you have a voice.  Reach down and dig it from the depths where you didn't even know it lies, if you have to - but the voice must be there.  It comes with consequences.  If you do not accept nor like this voice, everything written tastes like a strip of dissolving sandpaper in the mouth.  Those who call art their own calling know this hauntingly.

Yet sweet clarity is there to be found, despite.  Sometimes you have to mutter through your mess inarticulate (gasping through the bouts of self-loathing and doubt) for the reminder that that voice is there to be heard.  That hope is found not through numb retreat, but in the conscious - if momentarily unfulfilled - rest or motion towards the search and activity of this voice.

The irony of this post is not lost on me.  At the end of an exercise to see whether I could still write, I find out that I can.  That I do like it after all.  And perhaps I might even keep it up, if the strictures of an employment that is perfect in some regards and impossibly difficult in others does not snuff out the rest of that spark.

But that is the matter for another post, if I can find the voice to tell the tale.