Untenable
I am worried that I can no longer write. I don’t have many ideas these days. Well, I’ve had a few but they’ve remained formless; inoperable drivel reeled across a page. There is no force, no tide; the energy that carries you across the line is conspicuously absent. Plenty of aborted attempts and soft launches, crunching back down to earth in the familiar pathos of self-recrimination. Words. Words in the right order form a sentence. Several sentences form a paragraph. This is as far as it gets. Cramping, stuttering work; dry heaving with nothing left to give.
My Grandma gave me a typewriter at the end of the summer – an old two-toned hulk made by the enlightened workers of the GDR. A dead state, a dead mind. I got it repaired and all, hoping it might inject some nostalgic force into my writing, away from the insatiable blue light and unbridled digital opportunities. It sits there on the other side of the room; solitary, gathering dust, a half-completed leaf of yellow paper hanging out of it – my last aborted attempt.
It is night time, the end of the day. Seems as if it’s always the end of the day now. Flick off all the lights, make sure the hob is off, brush teeth, one last pulse of nicotine. In bed but not asleep – why does tiredness always desert you the moment you need it most? Shift over, right then left; mind whirring, staring at the ceiling, wondering where it all went wrong. Time dilation has taken a hold – why can I not recall anything significant from the last three months? It all seems to have merged into one: a trip to the pub, counting down the minutes wearing some stupid apron and fiddling with a bottle opener, glass eyed staring at words on a screen.
History and the end of history. Half of my life is spent in the past, transmitted through hours and hours spent in a library, sat on a spine eviscerating wooden chair. I’m a professional nostalgist, yearning for what was. This history business probably isn’t doing me any good.
I am worried I can no longer write. Even this is proving to be a struggle. What happened? Maybe it was those pills I took; five milligrams a day for five days. Sure, they helped. They got me through the five days, providing a thin screen against reality. A pharmacological cure for the sickness of the everyday. But at what cost? I imagine my brain irritated; synapses threadbare and singed to the point of no return. Words unable to bridge the gap, falling into the liminal space between.
Why does the mind work this way? The past is joy and comfort, where things fit neatly, as if they were supposed to happen. The future is a vessel of untapped potential and revolutionary change. The present is the vehicle in which we create the past and move into the future – the only vehicle of real experience. Yet the present remains, and will forever remain an obstacle to be surmounted. Get through it, cast it away, and then reflect and hope with equal falsehood. Deceive yourself into thinking someday things will be right, when the present, as it is, no longer exists. Self-annihilation: the act of living.
It is night time again. It is always night time these days. Liminal space by day, crushing finitude by night. The mantra of a pathetic vigilante; the final act in a play no one would attend.
I resonate with this. Moments when I feel sapped of inspiration take on an existential hue and my very ability to write (or not) is thrown into question. Even in these moments, however, my sense of irony doesn't forsake me, since there is something cutely ironic about writing about feeling unable to write. It's like a redundant axiom. You have written something—yes, it might not be Tolstoy, but it's something—and therefore you can write.
I subscribe to the Mania School of Non-Fiction Writing. It's not as popular as, say, the Chicago or Frankfurt Schools, but it will have its day. Its key tenet is that one should not write habitually but sporadically; your desire to write lays dormant and you produce nothing until you happen to read a great piece of writing which evinces a potent mix of excitement and envy that drives you back to your desk and you eke out reams of stuff in a matter of days. This tires you out and dormancy ensues. Rinse and repeat. (Reading your stuff, funnily enough, poked me back to the keyboard, as this inordinately long comment attests to). I hope I can revoke my membership one day and become a habitual writer but for the time being I will have to content myself with vacillating between bouts of frenzy and inaction.
Feeling like you've got nothing to say—and that whatever you do say will come out nonsensical, garbled, inchoate—but writing anyway is how the game is played. If it's any consolation, you write about the quotidian excellently. It never feels cliched. Keep coming back to the keyboard, but maybe give your back a stretch first!
Good to hear from you, and thank you for your kind words. I think you’ve hit the nail on the head perfectly. I often wonder whether I will ever have the discipline or guile to write habitually as you say; to sit oneself down and write despite not having anything there. I’ve tried it and unsurprisingly I hated it. In the words of DFW it feels like wrestling a sheet of plywood in the wind. So until the point comes when I can muster up the courage to tackle my own machinations and write through the maelstrom I think I too subscribe to this Mania School you mention.
Perhaps it’s just an embryonic, half-baked form of writing. I have never heard any successful writer not attest to the pain of sitting at a desk with nothing emerging to put on the page. I suspect part of what makes a good writer is the ability to ignore your ego (which is telling you how shit you are) and muddle through regardless. A level of writerly discipline if you will. I think this is why I would hesitate to call myself a writer proper. Only getting words down when they are flowing easily seems akin to turning up at your local rugby club only when the sun is shining. A fair weather writer. Leaving out the hard yards, the rain and the cold, with your feet up in front of the telly does not make you a bonafide anything quite frankly.
I hope things are well with you and that your final year isn’t too arduous. Any job prospects on the horizon?