Friday 28 May 2010

deadly, winking, sniggering

Firstly, I love this description: "…the summit of sex—the pinnacle of masculine, feminine, and neuter. Everything that he, she, and it can ever want… a deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love," - it's the prettiest thing anybody ever got sued by Liberace for.

Secondly, I'm reading (amongst other things) City Boy by Edmund White. I sat down in the park on the way back from work to read some. He was describing the way he'd get home from his crappy publishing job and furiously write in the evenings: "I forced myself to write plays and novels during the evenings after work - anything creative as a break from the torpor of an imagination-killing office job."

I do not write any more. I am just one of many people I know who no longer do the thing they used to be young and crazy for. I have other friends who no longer write, some who no longer direct plays, one who no longer composes music....Are we all just taking breaks from those parts of ourselves, or are they gone for good? Can you really set down something so important and never be able to find it again?

I do not feel like the same person as the one who used to write. My hand does not rush with ink to the page and even my thoughts do not fold and fit themselves around creative ways of expressing things any more.

I feel as though nothing is true enough, and nothing stays still in the same place for long enough to be described. I cannot tell any stories because I do not believe in any of them anymore.

Sometimes though, like today while I was blowing along in the enthusiasm within this book, I feel a glimmer of steel fishing around in the darkness for me. I can still summon the hope that it will hook firmly through my flesh and pull me out into a place where I am so alive that I can believe in the lies of fiction again and find them wonderful.

It is too late and I am too drunk on this feeling to censor myself, this is my naivite in full force.

1 comment:

  1. I neglected to say to you, how much i love this description: "Sometimes though, like today while I was blowing along in the enthusiasm within this book, I feel a glimmer of steel fishing around in the darkness for me."

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