The job of a writer is to make the reader feel something. I might want to move you to action or to remind you of a fleeting moment in your childhood that I’ve never seen but I’ve perhaps felt something sort of like it, and though vagueness and brevity, I let you fill in the gaps with your own stories. I let you reach a conclusion that would lead you to believe we are similar, we have known some emotion intimately, in a way that is almost the same. I’d even make you believe, perhaps, that we agree on the best way forward.
I had a proclivity for writing in the same way I did for drawing and for music. I took to things of a creative nature. “A natural ability,” they called it. But all they really meant is potential. A jack-of-all-trades is no genius, and the only way to greatness or even to proficiency is through practice. How do I know when I’ve had enough practice that my work is worth any light of day? There is no one metric by which to measure the skill of a writer. Subjective like all things, I had only grades and offers of employment to gauge any formal level of expertise in the art of words.
In writing and in music, it was easy to see where potential ended and the real work began. In these respects I stayed firmly planted in “Gifted, but not quite talented.” I learned to play a few chords by ear, but never to read music or play with a band with any sort of rhythm. On accession, a wild hair would provoke me to draw or to paint. Sometimes by surprise, something would turn out quite right and I’d think for a moment that if I really gave this time, I could have been an artist.
I certainly could have been a painter or a pianist or a dancer, but I am none of those things, at least not most of the time. But I do call myself a writer, and I often wonder if I ought to. This is a self-taught craft most often performed for the blue light of my laptop screen. The scribblings in my journals have never been peer-reviewed or stood up to any sort of critique. If it is art, it is one rudimentary sketch torn from the thousands of forgotten pages in all my discarded books. So few words make it to anywhere with air. What would it be like to breathe in all this history?
There was a time when all language was spoken and remembered. Story and symbol came alive in the literal space between your mouth and mine.
But so few of my words will ever know a breath.
The words I have shared have always been smiled upon, and I can never tell if it is in the sort of way a parent looks at their child’s drawing, or in the way a teacher notices a prodigy in the making. Even so, I’ve centered my career around the “art” of communication, and this is at least, testament to the fact that I write from a baseline of technical skill. I’ve been hired to write emails and statuses and articles — but these are tasks of efficiency and rules. If I was a pianist, I’d call these sheet music jobs — and I’d long for the freedom to play a tune as I go — to compose.
Sometimes people say if I wrote a book, they’d read it.
But I read Twitter and the paper and two-line poems and AI e-books and I want to scream out into the void of all this waste of language. How many ways can we say the same thing?
We’re lonely. We’re angry. We’re sorry. W’re horny. We want to belong and we want to see God.
Anyone can write, anyone can string together words to make a meaning. Whether its genius or bullshit depends on the time of day, a trick of the light. How far down the scroll-hole have I made it today — what profound epiphany will a stranger spin to me? Thank the algorithm for all this inspiration. The weight of all we knew used to live in books and now it is ether, ripe for any hands to touch and savor, slip through cracks of dirty fingers into a forgotten age.
So I don’t know if any of this is any use at all, really.
I think I’m writing to make you feel something, and the beauty of language is that I can — but only if I catch you at just this precise moment when perhaps you’ve cozied up next to your own custom-carved nostalgia, or entered into that brief time of day when you feel impassioned, like you just might get up and change the world (if it were only a little warmer out, if only you’d seen the sun today).
That emotion is the final ingredient of this delicate spell, this mix of words torn from my flesh and tossed into the murky mixture of your constitution and your morality and your specific kind of sadness. This, and the golden light around your bedroom window at sunset — all these final pieces must be perfectly set in place for you to understand the fullness of this art, the layers I hide, and how I’m asking you to feel everything, to feel it softly — to hold is longer than this moment. I’m asking you to remember how language used to feel heavy on your chest in the best way. I’m asking you to let these words know breath — mine and yours. To crack open a lightness that first knew heaviness. To spill out into the work of the day — of this age.
A voice is a voice, as long as it there is breath.
Comentários