Sunday, February 22, 2009

I couldn't get started

The hardest part about writing is that it’s so damn hard to get started. That first sentence is always there. A first impression that you can never get past. You never even know who this written piece will become, but in the end what does it matter. It will be who it is, the perfect person, never compromising itself for who ever might glance across it’s black and white features. It’s the writers prejudice that always gets in the way. We think that the words should be what we want them to be, but it is almost every writers folly, and a lesson that every writer must learn; Which is that no good piece of literature can be forced into something it’s not. Just as a tree grown under the constraints of an ax and pruning clippers cannot reach its natural majesty, so must the written word come from some source unknown to the logic of man. For if it is logical it is capable of being fully understood, and the moment it becomes fully understood is the moment that we can manipulate it into what we wish it to be, and it becomes a jar of dry chemicals found on a laboratory shelf.
Where is the mysticism of our scientific world. In eons past Magic was a reality, and miracles something of the mundane. When the world was still in it’s childhood it saw things with a different light. The stars told stories, and opened worlds to the faint of heart. Men would sail until they were past death, and would continue on, pushing their limits farther and farther into the dreams of possibilities. But the world has grown up now, logic makes sense of everything and yet problems are in abundance. What was the price of growing up? Why couldn’t we have held onto feeble dreams of magic, power, and gods? Why did the unknown have to thrown onto a cold metal table, and cut apart with scalpels until it was no longer something unique, wonderful, or amazing to behold? Why must it have been that way? Did it have to be? Must we grow up? Must we see the world with eyes wide open, and brain half closed?
Why do we still keep trying to go back? Why do the aged become more childlike as they get older? Have they remembered something that we’ve forgotten? The Grandfather no longer seems to wonder how regal his beard makes him when it’s pulled upon by the darling granddaughter. All those years of stress, work, and disdain for the world melt away into rolling chuckles and life becomes something wonderful again. What did he remember? Or was it something he forgot? Did he go write about his profound experience or was he too busy living it to care? Why do the poets write? Is it because they’ve lived? or is it because they can’t? So they seek to fill that empty slot with something strange and incomprehensible. Something that seems to be found in mass abundance among the coffee shops and smelly sofas. In places where umpteen year old girls rant over the microphone about the deep meanings of their useless tantrum. Why? Who cares? It won’t feed you, clothe you, or provide anything other than a mini sensation of something not quite understood. You try to understand it, you try to pick it apart, and in the end you give up and resort to some story about a man carrying a ring to mountain. You don’t know why it’s so captivating, but it is, for an ethereal moment you’re somewhere else. Somewhere beyond the limits of the page, someplace only you can imagine and dream, and you wonder to yourself. How did he ever get started?