Listening to: 10,0000 Maniacs, Love Among the Ruins

Emotions have gotten in the way of my writing lately. (Lately being the past few months which are sadly devoid of my life captured properly in all their woe-is-me entirety.) One might think back through the sweeping history of all things poetry and find such tragic examples like the romantics, who were emotionally driven into verse. But things haven’t been like that. The content of emotion has corrupted the concept. As always, there have been a select few “themes” penetrating my mind lately. This, being one of them. The idea that our gifts are the very things that hinder us. In a book about sexual selection I’m reading with some other people from school, the author talks about all art as being almost precisely this - useless. Not only useless, but burdensome. He compares humans’ seemingly superfluous capabilities - in other words, art - to a peacock’s tail. His plumage holds undeniable beauty to us, but to him it is a hazard, a penalty that lessens the chance of survival. It’s a silly and complicated theory, which I can’t exactly divulge with the greatest of ease even if I desired to. But it has been feeling like an apt simile, the peacock displaying the very thing that sets him apart as it drags him down.

“No pain no gain,” the voice of our fore founding clichés might utter in succor. And, yes, this is a valid statement. The world groans from its insightful depths, “NOTHING IS FREE IN LIFE!” But the pen feels so heavy at times, and I entirely week in my discipline. Whatever great patron of art once lodged with me in the past has now abated into an infrequent visitor. The mythical muses, are, as I’m convinced, no more than a good work ethic. It is my own fault that I am sitting here at the moment, complaining about my listlessness. I should probably clear something up - so as not to unintentionally evoke an ocean of tear-wrought sympathy: I am not concerned that whatever ability to write has been given to me is gone. I don’t spend my time lamenting over the deterioration of talent. But I do feel as if the greatness inside of me has been hibernating for practically my whole existence. The primary objection I have does not pertain to losing my competence to write, the problem lies within my perpetual incapability to write anything of substance. Unfortunately -- although there are a lot of beautiful memoirs -- I do not consider journal miscellany a brilliant stride towards the realm of good literature. Everyone must start of somewhere, it’s true. But I used to write stories and poetry so much more than I do at present. My last story dates back more than five months. I have a few in progress, but it seems as if once 500 words have been composed, making up the beginning and the end, I can do more. My stories remain bodiless. Dialogue presents itself as a challenge. The effort to write dialogue is rarely turned on. It is my failure to produce that upsets me. Not my ability to.

I often wonder what makes the artist truly copious. Is it love? Surely it factors in. I wrote so much more when I was with Kyle. I wanted to write more. It wasn’t that the content of all my attempts inevitably bowed down to the bliss of love, so that every time a word fell out it was either “your eyes” or “my heart.” It was just that I wrote more in general. I woke up happy. I woke up with something to say.

But what is the lack of romantic love? There is always love. Everyday I find myself in love with something else. Waking up at three am just to look out the window at the absolute perfection of stillness. I still wake up relatively happy. Am I lonely? Maybe, sometimes. (Even that is inspiration.) Really, though, I think it has a lot more to do with having too much. Not enough channels to deposit affection into. I end up with adoration, appreciation, admiration - all of this constantly inside me and I don’t know what to do with it. Who to share it with. So we’ve moved on to inner loneliness. Will that do it? Will that urge the artist to create? An introspective examination of the soul - all of the drama of Poe and Tennyson, those knights and ladies torn apart by the depressing gray world. When the heart feels empty, does it try to compensate by producing more emotions which translate into more art? It is an interesting subject. Surely inspiration is derived from all aspects of life, be it positive or negative, but to really understand when and why and how everything happens will be a subject forever veiled in dubiety. Just as it should be, of course.