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?

 


 
 

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