I've started writing a bit about this subject that seems to be occupying my consciousness a bit more these days. My postings have been quite spotty, and I'm just not feeling it. Still. It's quite annoying, but here are some thoughts as they've come up:
Lately, when I come home from work-not-as-a-writer, which I’ll refer to henceforth as “w-n-w”, I make my dinner, maybe do the crossword or an acrostic or a sudoku and clean the dishes and my kitchen space. If I’ve decided on a certain lunch the next day, I’ll go ahead and prepare that. I may need to do the laundry or some such household chore. I may even read something if I have a book at home that interests me, or I may sit with a divination tool and meditate on some issue, such as my creativity.
When I awaken in the morning, I usually start out either making breakfast or doing a breathing meditation. They’re usually the one-two of my morning in that order, though sometimes I do start out with the breathing first. Once I clean up the dishes and put them away, I go into my living room with my cup of coffee and perform two magickal tasks, leading to a twenty-minute meditation and then I write my morning pages. Once I’ve done those (and drawn my tarot card of the day) I do my toilet, dress and leave for w-n-w.
All the while, whether I’m at w-n-w or not, I’m thinking “I’m not doing what I want to be doing. I’m showing up for what I need to do, but I’m not ‘doing my job.’” At least that’s how a part of me sees this situation at present while the “spiritual” aspect of my larger self sees that I’m right where I’m supposed to be, blah-blah-blah. This is the part of me that, probably wisely but not without generating some frustration, takes a long-view and observes that I’ve never been continuously writing through my long identification with the written word, that I’ve had fallow periods.
This time feels a bit different than times previous, however. The curious thing is that I’m not at a loss for ideas, but I do have curious listlessness that I don’t quite understand. Much of my time these days, when I’m not at w-n-w (or more truthfully, when I’m at w-n-w in between projects), I log into web sites celebrating the end of our civilization as we know it. How much of this is for celebration is anyone’s guess, though I think long-term that egress from the corporatized and toxic existence we collectively and gingerly inhabit would do humanity as much good as it would the rest of the planet and all the other species we deny coexistence with.
Getting there will be quite like my own kicking my sugar/flour habit. Those days were filled with sourness, strife and contempt to be sure. But in the meantime, I need to be of service to others, and since I’m a writer, one would think I’d find a way to put that skill to use. I want to, I really do. I sit at a computer or with notebook in hand, and I think “So, what are you waiting for? Not inspiration for Cerridwen’s sake!” And I try to set to writing, I even get a couple of pages into something, then I put it down. Will I return to these started projects that don’t seem to go anywhere for the time being? I don’t honestly know.
Am I moving toward becoming post-literate/post-literary? A thought I’ve been having of late is that I don’t really want to add to this necropolitan society by competing for some ridiculous carrot called fame. Or even to send my paper-soilings in to literary magazines, theatrical literary departments, agents, editors, website proprietors, what-have-you, for them to peruse at their hectic leisure and to give a text ye-olde yea/nay, blah-blah-blah.
Perhaps I’m depressed and just don’t choose to call it that. Depression usually forecloses against hope, however. I feel happy and optimistic pretty much all of the time. Right now in fact, I’d say the only despair I feel is residual and it rubs off on me as I interact with others to whom it adheres like chewing gum left on the side of a bus. I don’t even have to know the person or to even be in the same room with them! Since having lost a whole bunch of weight, I have become so psychically open, it can be sometimes painful. Last Christmas season, I was meditating upon waking and found myself inside someone else’s head as the person was putting a gun in his/her mouth. I could my tongue against the metal, and when I realized I was tasting steel, I said “What the hell? Where the fuck am I?” and got out of there. (I learned my lesson, and now I shield at the holidays, and don’t take any sadness I may feel at face value. Most of the time, someone else’s yuletide despair has crept in.)
The most helpful I’ve ever been as a writer has been when I focused on my own experience. Why stop now, when I find myself in this strange and abundant writing-wasteland? What better place to start? It’s funny, but I’ve written quite a bit more on this subject already than I have put forth in my own artistic journal in several months. It’s not like I lack for ideas; I also have scripts and stories I’ve begun that I would like to return to at some point. But I sense there’s this blockage of grief and sorrow I need to dive through. I have the image of a big, amorphous bag of a sickly purplish liquid that sits inside this membrane that I can’t poke through or dissolve or have any impact on. And my spiritual assistance seems to be telling me to just sit with the situation and let its lessons unfold.
I could affect a Hercules approach and will myself to do battle with the amorphous gourd that impedes creative access and attempt to slay it a la the hydra, or to clean some Augean stable inside my heart and mind. But I sense I need a more soulful approach, one that lets the lessons of the melancholic place beside this massive obstruction seep into me. Everything is all right, there is no need or reason to do anything. And isn’t the world a pretty place to live in, by the way?
*****
(Day 2)
As I put together my thoughts on writer’s block, I need to be respectful of its delicious and capricious contours. As a for instance, I looked at what I wrote yesterday, and decided that the line I ended it on was the end of that whole thought. Time for me to begin a new page! Also, I understand that I might repeat myself, and I must give myself the permission to let whatever spills out onto this page to just be. Will I edit this mishagoss or just let the stink sit there and fill up the literary airs of pretense? For now, I will let the shit harden into a nice little clump of turd as if I was my Kitzel-bitz doing his bitzelness in his litter box.
Tangent: Isn’t it interesting that somewhere in the 1950s and 1960s, artists started talking of creating “good shit?” That isn’t an accident. Fecal matter is made within our bodies, after all, and when we’re babies, we’re so proud of our physical production numbers. And when we feel we’re in the zone of creativity, it is as effortless as sitting on the pot and letting it all go. In many ways, I do experience my writer’s block as creative constipation. I long to be able to spew my thoughts out as easily as I go number two. (And number one for that matter!) And also to have that satisfaction of having had a good dump!
I suppose my creativity is much more like the digestive process than I would care to admit, for I consume my experiences, research, ideas, dross-for-exorcism, what-have-you and process it through my “creatimentary” canal as it were, where the spiritual processes of the work progressing inside pull out their requisite nutrients and leave the work of art to be squeezed out of my “creanus” and plopped in all its olfactory loveliness into le monde d’art. (Oh, isn’t that just dreckful? I do amaze myself sometimes.) I think that’s enough shit-talk for now. Oh, and look!
The end of the page! Just in time, too…
******
(Day 3)
Now that I’m beginning a new page (on a new day), what other impressions arise about this state of affairs? In years past, I’ve thought of the notion of writer’s block as being akin to wandering through the desert in search of an oasis. Today, it doesn’t feel like that as much. In a way, it feels more like just being inside winter. Personally, I’ve always loved the fall and winter. Spring and summer were for many years difficult. Of course, I had my weight issues for most of that time, and since that problem has been kept in abeyance through the grace of deities unseen, I now can enjoy each season for what it truly offers.
What I notice about this particular writer’s block, which has operated in tandem with my abstinence, is that there’s a reevaluation of what I’m doing and what it is for. Truth be told, when I wrote B.A. (before abstinence), I was focused on the selfish goal of “making it.” I was doing it because I have never seen myself as merely an office worker, but a writer with a day job. And while I look at my 8-hour days at a workplace as being w-n-w, I have a different perspective about it today. I get to go to the place I work, and I get to type other people’s documents. I get to interact with these wondrous people called “attorneys” and “secretaries” and pretend to be a secretary myself. I get to even pretend that I’m not pretending to be a secretary, which is a gleeful kind of divine fuck-you energy subtly infecting everyone with joy and good will.
I also see that this workday thing is something to enjoy while it lasts, because it won’t be lasting much longer. And I won’t really grieve when it’s gone, though I do wonder what sort of thing will replace it. What sort of new opportunities for joyful obligation will emerge in the not-too-distant future? I also sense that my writing needs to take a more serious and painstaking approach to my writing, because it’s not for me anymore. Not that it ever really was, but B.A. I had to get things out that were to exorcise demons and to expose “the way things really were.” Also to write about the way things ought to be as I thought they should be. Now without my sugar addiction, that’s all changed. The writing needs to somehow serve as one bridge among many from this dying society into whatever is next. This particular writer’s block is much more profoundly restructuring my entire Writer’s Persona into something else entirely, into a creature I still don’t know or understand.
My writer’s block is part of my coming to terms with the person I’ve been waking up to these past almost three years as well as this wonderful and bizarre planet’s place in the scheme of things, this crazy and beautiful species of which I’m a part. It’s been about Instead of writing about stopping inside a field of colorful flowers and taking in the abundance of glory and beauty available to sight, sound and smell, I actually savor the present moment whether I’m in that lovely field of asters or one of asphalt. Why spend a lot of time creating another world, when a new world is creating itself around me, when I am adding my own energy into that creation?
*****
(Day 4)
In meditation today, I was told by my guides Freyja and Odin that I need to start preparing for “whatever is to come next.” I have been woefully inadequate thus far. I asked Freyja once not long ago how I was doing and she laughed at me. I need so much more, evidently.
Perhaps a part of me is understanding that writing is less important than other things right now, such as having enough food and staying warm throughout the upcoming winter. Our way of life is coming to an end, and it looks like it might be an abrupt one at that. The gods and goddesses really do want us all to survive and thrive. I do believe that they really do wish us to have a blessed and joyous time in this realm. Certain beings have interposed themselves between our gods’ desires for us and our own desires to “return home” or rather to create the memory of “home” we all carry inside us onto this planet.
I have the sense that the writer’s block is meant as a subject for my deeper exploration, but with things like being told “prepare for difficult times ahead,” I am curious to see how I’m supposed to have all these foci going on all at once. I suppose it’s one thing, then another, then another sort of. But I need to get cracking on something else now. I’m all of a sudden a bit scared, but I can start telling some people who I trust about this too. Wild.
*****
(Today)
I described the obstruction to a friend last night as a viscous and sickly substance inside a gelatinous and impenetrable bag sitting over a drain as a stopper. I’m looking for/waiting for the necessary solvent to dissolve the container and let the gunk traverse that drain, to clear it out and make space for something new. But I also realize that this stoppage has appeared because I’m also being restructured, my personality and soul are being reorganized to accommodate “the next world” whatever that may look like.
I don't know about the stuff I've written in the past, if it will help to serve this new world coming into focus around us all. I sort of think the scripts and poems and essays
might serve the new structures emerging, but what the hell do I know? I feel hopeful, even joyful about the changes that are popping up all around us. Goodness, I even saw
The Nutcracker for the first time ever this past weekend! Talk about joyous celebration. Perhaps I can be a sort of post-civilization Drosselmeier, I don't know. I see fairy dust out of the corners of my eyes every once in awhile. The gods and goddesses are with me every day, I invite them with me to the workplace. I sense I am a walking fountain of continuously streaming light emanating from my heart and pushing both up into the sky and down into the earth. There is so much more to this life I live than I know, and whatever this writer's block is about, it doesn't halt my smile, my urge to give thanks and my desire to celebrate my blessings. For I truly am blessed, I know it in my heart.