Writing is detox for the soul!

You must throw it all out—the good, the bad, the ugly, the nonsense. As you go on writing, your soul is cleansed from the toxic emotions and the biased perceptions you’ve gathered along the way.

Only by embracing your vulnerability and self-sabotaged separateness to your core will you allow your soul to gradually bathe in the ultimate paradox of self-realization. A writer’s journey starts in a state of rawness to reach a refined and processed awareness.

I have this piece I’m struggling to write. The words are all in my mind, dancing in complete disharmony, chanting to make sense. It’s about the treachery of premises, and the flattering expectancy fooled by fancy pretenses. It’s about the masquerade of affairs condemned to desolation.

All I can muster is a collection of words portraying the bloody fate we fabricate to satisfy our sadistic hungers. All I can master is the tapping of my fingers on the used keys wishing to make sense of the absurd.

So, I decided to pen my restless thoughts in complete disharmony, and trust them in according themselves in the process.

See, I’ve been thinking, how could one pen so eloquently after reading Cohen, Hemingway or Nick Cave? How could one dare to portray a love affair after indulging in the literate passion of Anais and Miller? The phrasing of their sentiments is grandiose and I wonder what amount of anguish they had endured to possess such word power.

I could lay here for days, uninterrupted by the outside world, writing. But oh, how I struggle to pen the requiem of departures.

There are various kinds of partings, some are excepted and temporary, and others are absurd. The latter originates an irreversible bitterness. And let me tell you something about bitterness—it’s a self-consuming fire ignited by the vanity of our capricious whims, quenched by the disenchantment they leave us with. We are constantly depicting realities, relentlessly chasing impossible pursuits.

Disappointment comes from great expectations. Bitterness, from too little.

I sometimes want to write about my unwillingness to write. Some days, words are dancing the waltz a thousand times as fast; other days, they fall into deep slumber. It aches. I want to write. I have this constant yen to pen, yet no words will do.

When this happens, I travel in time, have coffee with Bukowski, and a Bloody Mary with Hemingway. I tell them my story, they offer me words, and I borrow them ’til the waltz takes off again. When the music stops, I elude into the opium den, where they all repose, silenced and free. I tell them, “Give me, Oh! I urge you to give me some words to appease my world.”

Some days, my waltz is dimmed; other days, I slumber with the resting souls, in the opium den. And I reflect on the writerly curse.

See, one does not willingly and consciously become a writer. Writing happens to you; it barges in and invades your core; it is Venus fastened on her prey, and you’re doomed. Only with this apprehensiveness of being versus doing can we fathom Hemingway’s curse or Miller’s demonic possession.

As a writer you seek and seek, you are always in the seeking; you long and long, you are always in the longing.

The gap between your everyday life and the world of illusion you fabricate lies in the writing process. Only when the words are inked in a harmonious structure do you reach solace and peace.

Unable to live in the distorted reality, you find refuge in your words, and produce an unintelligible world in which your desires would get some kind of sense.

A writer possesses a melancholic soul—as he inks, he bleeds, as he weeps, he reproduces.

A writer gradually self-indulges in melancholy. The more he writes, the more pleasurable this melancholic state of being gets.

“Melancholy is the pleasure of being sad.”

~ Victor Hugo

Writing involves solitude, seclusion from reality, but in this solitude lives many, the writer and his characters, the writer and his stories. It is a noisy solitude. And as the curse hits the writer, a perpetual metamorphosis takes place in which he is in constant confrontation with his impulse, for creation.

Doomed he is to live with and for words, doomed he is to find pleasure in sorrow, to cherish madness and endure anything for his art.

A writer is many things but one thing he is not is the master of his fate.

 

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Apprentice Editor: Andrea Charpentier/Editor: Travis May

Photos: Flickr