Intimate Stranger

I SIT HERE

I sit here with bent shoulders, eyes smarting from looking at the screen as if searching for the truth. The screen is a lit funnel giving onto darkness. Is there light at the end of the tunnel? Writing this as a diary, slithery snake, knowing I will never be able to cover the days or foresee the nights. Writing is such a contradictory process.

Why do we do it? And why do we continue doing so, or have to do it over and over again? One knows there are many easier ways of drawing attention, of parading the self with its paradoxes and its pain. There are certainly more effective means of conveying information (though there seems to be ‘existential information’ embedded exclusively in the primordial need for making words). One also knows that the practice is not remunerative: given the effort and time consumed (for even at best one doesn’t produce more than two good pages a day) it is a singularly inept way for the human to make a living.

So then, why?

Ancient Chinese lore has it that writing evolved from magical signs, from runes and the ‘symbols’ or ‘depictions’ of the bones cast by diviners. It is said that on the day man started to codify the signs and their meanings by repeating them at will, and thus losing him / herself by beginning to trace the openings to the unknown, gods and demons wept because now there was no longer only Heaven and Earth. Man had manifested herself, interjected herself between reality and dream, and bared the cunt of creation. Now there was a go-between straddling the known and the unknowable and something autonomous (writing, conscious becoming) came into being with its own realness, if not ‘reality.’ A twin emerged. An intimate stranger.

Writing is a conscious attempt by the human to participate in his fate, that ‘story’ written from birth to death. Casting spells, exorcizing, whistling in the dark, inventing the textures and the structures of consciousness, keeping a backdoor open to memory, getting to know who and what we are, both reflecting what is and shaping the new. Memory is nothing but dead time, but death seeds the soil: from forgetting new shapes sprout. .

For writing is a means to transformation: using words and their interacting combinations — the meanings, the feel, the sounds and the shadows — to broaden our scope of apprehending and understanding ourselves and others, and in the process creating new spaces and references. Sometimes looking down into hell.