A Cautionary Tale

Upon first reflection, I don't know why or when I actually decided to write.  The maelstrom of youthful emotion in which I chose such a course is far removed from the more reserved nature I have developed in adulthood.  Sometimes I wish I still possessed that manic verve of my teen years, yet I am often glad I moved beyond it.

A certain positive of my young experience was that I was inspired to pick up a pen at the slightest provocation.  I was raw life, bristling, over-sensitive, rarely declaring any endeavor of the mind off-limits.  These days, there are constraints on the creative impulse, regulations.  I think the key to this difference is that, when I was younger, I wrote for myself alone.  Now I am more concerned about communicating with an audience.  All sorts of paranoia and mental blocks ensue....

Having traversed the path from nearly bursting with so much to say to having very little which I deem worthy of conveyance, the question is begged, "Why am I still doing this?"  "Why did I begin doing this?"

Returning to the origin, my first response is, "Sex."  I did it to impress girls.  This wasn't a conscious decision, but an underlying propulsion of the genes.  At the age of fifteen, my hormones erupted, and all else proceeded outward from that big bang of the male constitution. 

But why did I choose writing?  Probably because it was the most available way to display my chief asset, my mind.  I was noodly, nerdy, and unathletic.  Though possessing physical stamina, tenacity, and more guts than I could back up with muscle, I could not be of any value to the world (girls) through sporty exploits.  Even if I could play basketball, or some such, the girls interested in that sort of thing were not the ones in which I had vested my interest.  I was drawn to nerds of a feather.

I began with writing song lyrics and music, but, when it came to music, I had two strikes against me.  I wasn't going to be bothered with the drudgeries of learning an instrument, and I never really have worked well with others.  I tried several times to be a lead-singer, but all I ever managed to do was piss off the band with my tendency to be a control-junky.  I had to find a more solitary practice.

Enter poetry.  I began reading e. e. cummings, and I decided that I wanted to be like him, gallivanting about the world, successfully wooing women, revered in life and after death.  The difference, though, was that Cummings came from a fairly wealthy family and could gallivant and woo with impunity.  I came from a family with collars the deepest of blue.  The difference mattered little to me at the time.  Poetry was going to be my ticket to everywhere.

What happened as I wrote more and more is that, over time, I cared less and less about girls and became consumed with the word.  Granted, I still wrote many erotically tinged paeans to women, but I was becoming more immersed in the process than the end result.  I discovered the surrealists and pledged my allegiance to liberation through the unification of the objective world with the deeper recesses of the life of the mind.  Art would be my salvation!

It didn't work.  After a few years, I was forced to choose between liberty and having a place to live and food to eat.  I chose safety.  Ever since that point in time, as the grip of utility's enslavement ever tightens, writing has become a chore and a daily footnote.  My imaginary audience of the ideal feminine vanished and has yet to be replaced.

What does one do when something so cherished becomes so difficult and seemingly useless?  I don't profess to know.  All I do know is that I can not let it go.  It has become inextricably ingrained in who I am, a shiftless quack.