I never wanted to write in the first place. I don't enjoy it, I get nothing from it. I know some people do, but the majority of people aren't interested in what I say. From time to time, I like to contemplate my work and kinda like the sensation that words pile up and there is now something where nothing used to be. That's true. But I don't like it. I started when I was about twenty because I wanted to start communicating ideas and well, writing seemed quite a straightforward way. Also, it's easy. Also, it's cheap. Also, I don't need technical ability or expensive equipment to.
There's plenty of reasons to write anyway. It lets you explore, organize, develop, structure ideas. Get them out from the cloudy interconnected but disseminated stream of consciousness and put it against, not real life, but at least the consistency trials of dialectics. My best lines and thoughts have always been in random, casual conversations, but due to their nature, their get lost to memory and time. I didn't like the idea of that, that the ever-evolving internal consciousness would eventually consume my thoughts and erase them from existence. Deleting all proof that they existed some day. That I existed some day. During the last four thousand years, writing has had the highest correlation with immortality. That reason still exists, but I don't fear that so much today. The reasons for it, I can only guess. From a liberation from self-importance, to a more emotionally close relation with death.
But I don't think so. Maybe it's more about giving me the hope that something has come out of a lifetime of preemptive reflection. That it doesn't amount to nothing. That even if my ideas don't inevitably led me to unbiased success in some random endeavor, they are worth something by themselves in making me a special man.
They aren't.
Writing, like every creative endeavor, is related to the ego in some way. But I'm not a crusade here against my sense of self. After all, when trying to fight off what we consider (or they consider) our demons, we have to be careful to not erase the best part of ourselves.
I have never lacked ideas. It has nothing to do with being cleaver or being creative. I just have a constant, intense intellectual life and they kind of emerge from there. If I'm in an era of writing, watching a YouTube video gives me dozens of things to write about. An speed-run of Pokemon: "Life as an RPG, Game Theory, Learning, AI, The Concept of Time". An scene about a movie about Rome: "How can we perceive the ancient world through the lenses of state-nations, when they were born in the 18th century? Can we really know anything beyond the boundaries of the cultural ideas we explore the world through? How are those ideas communicated. What role language plays in it. Narrative. Music. Power." It's too much. Because writing isn't an activity to me. I don't just write when I'm writing, writing is a state of mind of intense openness to intellectual ideas. Of inner conflict, of inherent hypervigilance. I'm in the shower, I get ideas. I'm eating, I get ideas. I'm working in a manually absorbent and intense labor, I get ideas. I'm trying to sleep, three hours already past my usual time, I get ideas. I have to get up, search for that line and implement it. Because otherwise, they get lost to time. And a new idea the next morning is never as good as the one that no longer exists. It's exhausting, and I get tired, and I force myself, and then I start to fear keyboards.
I've tried to note it, only in name or brief descriptions. That kind of helps. I make lists of things I should write or whatever about, and this way I can be a little free from them. But they pile, and pile. I made one last week. I was trying to focus myself. It had only three elements. Now, it's about two pages and a half long. Eventually, it traps me. I feel guilt, anxiety, and just erase it forever, or put them where I can't see them no more. Lost to time. I have post-its with cryptic names of articles that I have no idea what they were meant to be about, that date from more than eight years ago. I have more half-written shit than published articles, even when over the years I have published about two hundred of them. And yet, I have the sensation I haven't even begun explaining myself. Ten years later, I see another million words ahead.
Luckily, I don't feel the need to justify my actions and decisions writing, but I see how that could become a problem to some people, or to myself if I try myself too hard to power through.
It used to be manageable. Not only because I maybe had more determination, but because reality wasn't that expandable to me. The lists of topics are not separate elements, it goes more like: I want to write about this important thing, but in order to do that, I have to explain first those other three things. That process goes on and on. There's no end to it. There's no conclusions, no easy answers. Sometimes they are cute ideas that seem to wrap the thing, but not much else. Now everything I want to talk about needs not three previous articles but a lifetime of conversations and shared experiences before I feel my listener kind of understands where I'm coming from. And that's before talking about the actual thing I was going to write about. Behind my feet, knowledge and reality expands in a fractal manner towards chaotic uncertainty and the abyss. The only moments I can write is when I can freeze it during a second and take a misleading and partial picture of one of it's many tentacles. But I know it's a lie. It was outdated in my mind the second I started typing.
And that's the "extensive" problem. Then there's the opposite one.
"To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour."
When you try to say something, and compressing it, trying to reduce it to it's essence, you find out there's a threshold in which it just disappears. And just before that, it seems to contain the whole world. A complex cosmos of ideas and free associations regarding not only the meaning of the words but it's pace, form, beauty, order. They take central stage and you can just witness it, truly incapable to touch it. Then you remember you can't write. At all. You can play with the keyboard all you want, you won't able to understand a single word and it's infinite internal world doesn't matter how much you stare at it. To capture an idea would require an insane exercise of beauty I'm not capable of. Every phrase is a failure to capture that ideal.
Its like, you see a stain of a wall. You get close to it, and its actually a bump on the paint. I can fix that. You take your tools, like a spatula and that paste that covers wall stuff. You scratch it a little and a bit of water comes from it. Interesting, maybe it's a leak or humidity of some sort. When trying to take it off so you can cover it, you discover that the underlying problem goes on an on, and entire chunks of painting start to come off. You get mad at at, and are determined to solve the root problem. In your frenzy, you dismantle almost a square root of painting. Exhausted, panting, you realize what you have done. It was just a fucking small stain, I could have live with that. Now its too late. In a moment of clarity, you decide you can't go on, and will have to conform with your wall being fucked in the long term, something you can solve when you repaint or rebuild the whole room. For now, you have to cover what you did at the best of your ability, and fast, before someone comes up. You do so, and at the last patch, before the final touch, you hit the wall accidentally, and notice that a brick is slightly loose. Just because you can, our of curiosity, you slowly take it off the wall entirely, and look at the other side. What you though was a wall, and where you though there was another room at the other side of it, there's an intergalactic portal to another dimension. An entropy mess of alternating realities, with words, math formulas and ridiculous stuff flying around. The foundation of reality reveling itself to be an incomprehensible mess. Solemnly, you put the brick again where it was, sort of masquerade your initial fuckup in what now looks like a convincing wall and walk away in silence. Then, eventually, your partner or landlord or parents notice something is changed in the wall, and you spend the rest of the day talking about humidity, stains, building maintenance, brands of putty and shades of white paint, pretending how important they are and eventually believing it yourself.
That's writing to me.
I can kind of write if I do it in one sitting. More, I start thinking about the universe again. This kind of one-off articles often in exotic languages. I think about it, but not too much, and then regret it the next day in silence. Because that's not writing, its spilling over the keyboard. Not because I overshare or anything, or because I'm sincere, but because of the absolute opposite. I can't even stop myself from obsessing about them and editing during the next week. This is a fucking edit, for example. Writing makes me selfconscious beyond belief. It's a downwards spiral. Once I start, it becomes integrated into my thinking, its almost a department of it, an extension (or sometimes a form, imagined) of my own inner dialogue. Hell, most of my writing starts because I start imagining me writing something as a proxy to develop a line of though and turn into actual writings, therefore becoming what should just be speculative work. It gives permanence, which is sometimes useful, but horrible when it becomes an internal demand for everything I think about. I can see myself preaching, spitting small drops of saliva into the crowd, convincing myself because I like my own voice. This edit should be a total rewriting. Its structure disintegrating while I pile up more and more words into it, trying to explain everything but blurring it into nothing. It's original form shouldn't even exist, it makes me too proud and too attached to the initial spirit and form than I can never possibly now think or write about the subject the way because it has already a definite form in my mind. An insufficient one. A decadent one.
When I write about something, it should have intent behind it, power. If there isn't, why the hell am I writing about it in the first place? It's because I fear writing, that I have to come up with these cheap and coward tricks; like writing. There's more history behind a single one of my ideas than what I can remember. They deserve better than this. Not because they are mine, but because I fail to deliver its complexity and wonder. I like the levity, but I hate it as well. How can I summarize an entire epoch of my life in a couple of remarks of snappy language? What the fuck am I going to say about questions better minds than me have spend rivers of ink into? Writing like I do makes it sound casual, it subverts the expectation that this things that shape our life are very serious, suggests that the highs and lows of human existence are just a game. I imagine it kind of puts me above them, like a self-depreciating joke that makes the presents fake laugh, interchange looks and drink sour grapes while I stand there, proudly. I go to write this things, and I can't even remember where to start. I feel it, the blood and powerful imagery that inspired it, but I can't access that world. Only try to access in reverse, when there's already nothing. This place is a wasteland. Somewhere I come to reap the spoils of war. What a crude exercise, so detached from what happened. The only way out of the spiral is either surviving it, or cheat. This is cheating. How smart, the witticisms and jokes. I hate it. I hate it so much.
I can write, but I can't edit.
When I finished my book, I felt nothing but relief that I didn't have to write it anymore. During a couple of weeks, I felt a bit less pressure. Like if the book could talk for me so I didn't have to "force" myself to being a representation of me. Almost nobody will ever read it, but that's not my fault. The words are there. I am there. It was never my fault if even that you refuse to see.
That's assuming the book does a good job at explaining anything, which I'm not sure of.
I tried a lot of things to make writing manageable. I tried enjoying it, not enjoying it, putting a sense of purpose behind, scheduling it. Essays, songs, poetry, narrative, scripts, reviews, interviews. In all kind of styles. Three languages. Some got early success in making me write and not hating every second of it, maybe because of novelty, but got tired of them pretty fast. The enjoying one, I wrote a short novel in english about some guys living through the sixties in an abandoned house. When I finished, I thought I could never write another word ever again. My girlfriend liked it. Maybe it wasn't bad (don't know, never read it). But I felt fucking bad. It was light, and good spirited. I felt cheap, and filthy. And bad. There was no blood on the pages. Anyone could have written that. I find myself chasing that high, of having said everything I wanted to and feeling, satisfied. But it doesn't come. Never has. Never will.
Why do I write then, in the first place? I though I had an answer, but I don't remember it anymore. There's no reason. Never had. Never needed it. I don't know. Maybe it gives me the illusion of finality. That things have an end. Ideas go to die in writing, if not, they can never end.
There used to be a joke here. About me not writing anymore and then going like "well before I shut up forever let me say this one last thing" and then never shutting up forever and continue writing without a discernible reason for doing so until the end of my days. It was terrible. And that's probably what I'm going to do, for bad or for worse, in one way or another, burning every reason and logical explanation I find for myself. There's no romantic determination behind it. No idealistic pursuit. Just a silent resignation to continue living the way I have always lived until I find another.
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