It is too late for this but I'm starting it. I need a different way to keep track of my writing, my thoughts, my inner world. I need to try something different, since small notebooks crumble, get smashed and forgotten in the tillage of my push-pull, come and go life. Paper is great for the mud, beer and rain of the field, but they must be cached elsewhere. And that brings me here.
It has been pointed out to me that I need an audience and that I should start a blog. I thought, I've always seemed to enjoy writing when I was in direct transmission mode. My days of writing really began in chat rooms and in the letters to friends at home and abroad. So... I need to write to people. And now, after ten years of calling myself a writer, I realize that I have had no real audience. I've been in a far off isolated realm writing to and for myself--and I am a hard person to please. The standard then has become to recoil, avoid the dissatisfaction by deferring the writing process. So then the next problem begins: I have not been held accountable for my words. I always told myself and others, "Language is makeshift. Words are clay in our hands, to be played with, sculpted." But that view is rarely accepted in dialogue. When I used one of my misshapen words from my private world of thinking, I was always asked to elaborate, explain, choose a different word. I would have been better thinking of words as granite stones, complex in their crystalline composites of meaning but solid, resolute. For so many years I have looked upon writing as scaffolding only to be torn down. I have developed some very bad habits and notebooks full of unfinished work. Each page is its own palette of colors mixed but not applied, its own work site of boards assembled but not erect. In my private world of writing I know my words too well, create new meanings only I can unlock. My poems were bottled up in short-hand. But I think, at least now, I've had a good bit of practice in the thinking about what I want to say. It's embarrassing to think I made it through my Creative Writing concentration without this basic epiphany. Will my past mentors ever forgive this flaw? Perhaps now I can begin to search for my audience, to imagine that someone is listening, reading. But who is it?
If I imagine a you, it is not too hard to shape a feeling, a some-body. But who is the you? What body? Who are
you reading this? Not family, maybe friends. In my mind I imagine all of the people I've owed a letter, a poem, an email in the last 5 years--professors, colleagues, poets, writers--standing together in a crowd, unaware of one another, tapping their toes, looking at their watches. I've built this anxiety in having waited so long to write. Now I can hardly begin for the apprehension of not meeting both their and my own expectations. My audience, both in the real and literary sense, has waited too long! But what a poor way to live! I must have been writing something all these years. I must tweak now my own perception of myself and get on with the business. Writing is to daily speech what ground water is to surface streams. It runs deep, protected from changes of the daily civilization, to nourish others across the distances of time and space. But aquifers must be recharged. This blog is an important step for me. And, as the new mantra goes, I must remember the audience. They will drink from the aquifer of these words and I hope to to keep their mouths free of grit.
I'm performing some Ishmael-the-Gorilla number, transmitting without moving my lips, eyes fried to a pale screen in my parent's white-tiled kitchen. It's 1:46am. I would never stay up this late normally but here, in Livingston, it is painfully easy to do. Just one room over is the timeless space, the island of lotus: the living room eternally filled with the glow of lamps and television and the voices of happy strangers advertising insurance, medicine, happiness. There is so much to be said for that room and what it has done, is doing to people. So much I want and need to say about my father's condition. But for now I will retire my lonely bones... and thank my audience, whoever you are, for giving me the time of night...
