To be that naked in front of the world leaves you more vulnerable than you ever were before. Doing it every day, day in and day out, is exhausting. I do not know why other people write. I can only know why I write. It is not a choice. To be that naked in front of the world renders you complit to the silence of the writer’s throat. Yes, there are other things to write about versus love, sex, secrets, disease, death, remorse, relationships, violence, the ability to move from one place to another, childhood, rape, fear, rage, luck, greed, generosity, the stupidity of homo sapiens. This is the short list.

The writer, Maria Popova, is one of the best. She understands there is no end game. There is only constant learning, constant states of changing awareness.

https://www.brainpickings.org/?cid=f75b7697c8&mc_eid=3a8269557f 

Brainpickings is some of the best writing anywhere that spans and scans that middle place between the morbid and the mystical. The musical and the misbehaved. For years, I wanted to write like that, but the voices in my head just kept slapping me around.

There is a difference between writing and placating through the use of rules. You are placating the audience. You are placating the editors. You are placating the publishers. You are placating the critics. You are placating Amazon. You are placating the agents. Commercial media has gatekeepers who keep score. How have you done placating all of this and far more. The sea is ripe with the writer’s bones.

Popova is articulate. ” Because we are human, because we are batted about by the violent immediacies of everyday life, such gratitude eludes us as a continuous state of being. We access it only at moments, only when the trance of busyness lifts and the blackout curtain of daily demands parts to let the radiance in, those delicious moments when we find ourselves awash in nonspecific gladness, grateful not to this person, grateful not for this turn of events, but grateful at life — a diffuse gratitude that irradiates every aspect and atom of the world, however small, however unremarkable, however coated with the dull patina of habit. In those moments, everything sings, everything shimmers. In those moments, we are most alive.”

This is writing.

I have tried reaching for the light she sees. But my world, my reality is dark. It is a clawing of the fingernails to the sides of the survival abyss as you fall and there is no bottom. For me to call one of my books GENOCIDE should tell you more than enough. The challenge there was to paint a picture of sex and death. Violence and community. My writing fails again and again.

I want to turn what I did in writing into what I do with photography. It’s still dark. It’s still about the shadows. It stills deals with the same subjects. But I can stand back from it. With writing, I am always in the middle of the thing.

With the book I am writing now – Going Rogue –  I am still in the middle of the thing. The book won’t scare you. But it does scare me. These are the voices who live inside my soul, and they have a lot, too much, to say. It’s like standing naked in front of the world, but you have an erection and everyone can see it. You are not supposed to say that. The voices and the erection want to tell you that they were there. All writing is about the past. You cannot capture the moment because the moment is over. Popova gets the physics of the thing. Very rare.

There is a there there. There always has been. But accessing your second self is not for the the faint of heart, or the commercial world, and I DO NOT KNOW WHO IT IS FOR STOP ASKING ME. I’M TIRED OF HEARING IT LIKE I WOULD KNOW. I do not know. And I do not care to know. What I know of writing is that it only is.

STOP TELLING ME IT IS ONLY A FILE ON A MACHINE.

It’s not that. It’s not that.