I
Writing is an art, a jealous one at that. You have it in you and you're
doomed for a lifetime of unease. You (must) appease your writing sense
constantly with oblations that necessitate that you eat up leaves, spill ink on
paper as well as imagine the imaginable and the unimaginable, its twin. That
you have to read and write, by the way is not the big deal. You already know
you have to do both.
That writing is a jealous art is the big deal! That it wants a whole 24
hours to itself. You're on the toilet seat and all you can think about is what
a character's response would be to the rape of her son, by the father. You're
on the roadside and you are burdened by the fact that your 7 - 7 job has denied
you from scribbling something, poignant or otherwise in a long time. You realise
that the moment you heed the call to be a writer, your consciousness becomes
the art's monitoring mechanism, whipping words and characters and lots of
times, waste-bin-worthy stuff out of your experiences and imagination. It, this
consciousness - when the space and time (as writing desires) to whip out your
phone and type away or to write that poem in your pad doesn’t come - treats you
like you're shit and sanity is far from you. So far, as Timbuktu. Or even that
your sanity is somewhere in Timbuktu, roaming the streets in search of free
sex...
II
I think a break from writing is harmful to the writer. It, that break,
makes him feel like there is no essence for which he lives. It makes him seem
insane at other times. And that is often my predicament. I feel incomplete and on
account of this wish I can squelch life out of the bitch of the good thing that
writing is.
I want to write. Yes, I do, but I won't on a hungry belly. And that is
the cause of the break most times. I take the liberty to reverse the scripture
here: man must not live by words alone.
It’s about food. Daily bread.
III
I won't feed on letters and images, beautiful sentences and all. True. But
then, what is the essence of a life of enough (and the quest for more) when the
mind is not at rest; when the consciousness that you write will cordon peace
off your mind?
IV
I desire to keep these two parts of me: I want to live, as comfortable
as I can afford, yet I want to be free from the torment of the writer's
consciousness. Hence, I'll keep working for my daily bread while writing the
little I can, per day. And wherever. A sentence per day isn't too little. No?
