It's a restless sort of feeling, one which you might have been carrying around all day or which sprung up with insufferable urgency moments ago. I put it down to the weeks of absorbing. After seeing and feeling and reacting but not actually replying, it's a natural need for a clean white space to be patterned by words moving from brain to page and not the other way around.
Which isn't quite to say I'm the source of my words, pulling language out by the ears from a silk hat. The whole thing is more of a despairingly approximate translation from breathless and jumbled syllables of experience into something with pretensions to eloquence, syntax and structure and all. Except when the cacophony bursts its banks and so you do away with structure, too.
And having assuaged my feverish impressions with the indulgence of expression I find it's not enough. Looking down it's a clunking mass of mechanical prose, slumped under disappointing technicalities and scribbled out imprecisions that flights of fancy need never reckon with. More scarred than patterned, if I'm honest.
It's a poor worker who blames their tools and I strive to leave the medium out of my frustrations – of course I should have added this, of course that should never have seen the light of my desk lamp. Sloppy work, but it's sloppiness I answer for. My vision needs to sharpen, that's all; the words are already there and waiting to be noticed.
"You're fumbling for a fictional switch in an empty room," proclaims a snide little voice and I shut my drawer somewhat harder than needed in retaliation. What a useless line of thought. You wouldn't take up a palette and whine about the limitations of the rainbow. Though as the echo of the drawer dies out the doubt resurfaces with a vengeance – why do you think everything is translatable? Why do you think the perfect phrase exists?
I will follow the tangible pinpricks of clarity as if they lead to Bethlehem. In the act of writing I declare my faith. I declare my faith in the act of writing.
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