I have lately found it very difficult to write. Every word has been a chore and my once verbose fluidity has run dry. There was a time when I wrote constantly. I wrote poetry, essays, short stories, treatments for future novels, etc. However, for the last couple of years I have been beset by both an intense need to write and a dread fear.
For me, it is only in writing that I can feel myself free and open. When I speak, unless it is from prepared remarks or unless it is around one of the very few persons in whose presence I feel comfortable, talking can be torturous. The words come ajumble spilling across my tongue and tripping indelicately over my teeth only to pratfall at my lips. Perhaps I have too high of standards for my communication; I despise idle chatter and small talk, though I recognize that it serves a social function not discernible from its vacuity of content. It is the interstitial adhesive of social interactions.
Writing is my meditation and my prayer (hence the name of my blog). I have, at times, actually written my prayers in the form of poetry. Meditation is at the its most basic organized, directed, sustained thought and as such is the basis of all prayer and writing. It is perhaps for this reason that I have found writing so difficult lately. Mark Twain, that divine agnostic, wrote that, "you can't pray a lie." I find it diffult to write a lie. That is not to say that I don't write fiction, merely that I must write honestly and when I find a blockage, I do not write lies, I simply stop writing, I stop meditation, I stop praying. It is a damnable sin to tell a lie, but is a damning sin to lie to oneself. It warps your soul and leaves bare the conscience of the sinner.
It was Abraham Lincoln who said that we must trust that Right will make Might; that from righteousness will come power. This is echoed in the Doctrine and Covenants where we read that from virtue arises confidence and here is power. There are those who can with great flippancy marshall words to defend any cause. I admire the flexibility of that talent, but for me, I can only express myself when I say what I utterly feel and for some time now I have felt unable to be honest with myself and hence unable to write. I have, instead, attempted to sate myself with TV and books hoping against hope to drown out my thoughts with the thoughts of others, to deaden beyond feeling my spiritual sense. But this is a failure and I am a victim of my own fears.
But the impulse remains. For fear of self honesty I hide from it; though it compels me day after day. I find myself composing in my mind on the train, on the street, thoughts of brutal honesty and sometimes sublime insight. I rework them again and again, but too often I lose them to the ether. How I wish I had the courage to write what is bursting within me, but it is too easy find an excuse. It is not difficult to bound between two poles, for how can I justify writing when have so many other responsibilities weighing upon me? Yet I am weighed down in inaction by fear.
O if only I had a muse! The times when I had someone to write for have been my most productive for, to paraphrase Tom Stoppard, writers publish publically what others think privately. I am not sure as to whether I am a "good" writer or not, but I am not a consistent one. My words are pretty, but my pages are a mess. My ideas come not in verbs or phrases, but in pictures, in wholes, in blind yearnings for a way to match what I see and feel. In my meditations, my tantric mantra is the steading tap-tapping of the keys. But for the last couple of years the visions and the images have been blurred, the yearnings confused, and the wholes dislocated. There is a blockage, a Pauline thorn with which I have lived now for so long that I am afraid to remove it for fear that once gone, I will be all out of excuses.
