Writing is to never stop trying again......

William Faulkner said, "All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection . . . . That's why he [the author] keeps on working, trying again; he believes each time that this time he will do it, bring it off. Of course he won't, which is why this condition is healthy. Once he did it, once he matched the work to the image, the dream, nothing would remain but to cut his throat, jump off the other side of that pinnacle of perfection into suicide." Writing is not a task we finish it is ongoing until we stop breathing. When we stop writing we might as well stop breathing.

Faulkner captured my feelings when for decades I was letting distractions in my life keep me from writing. I felt as if a part of me were dead. It is funny the things, the people, the places that can bring you back to life after you have lived for years as the living dead. Someone, something, some place touches that little spot in your soul you thought had abandoned you. When the spot is touched you are electrified into a natural high. The surge of electricity jumpstarts your mind, focuses your thoughts and tosses you into a new place in the world.

Iris Murdoch said that "Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea." I say every story the writer writes is the destruction of a perfectly planned life. What is an experience? Something we live through and if we don't live through it then we create an experience for others to live through. There is no experience we actual write that is how we lived it and there is no experience lived that is as we dreamt it. Think of how many times your dreams of sex with a beautiful woman would have been better left a dream. Think of the jobs that were better when you were daydreaming at the job you had. What is my reality is not yours just like what is your reality is not mine. Somewhere in the middle is a reality that truly exists. That is the reality the writer writes.

A delusional idea a non-writer has is their writing can be controlled. Writing is a freedom of expression that is uncontrollable. If it doesn't come out here then it sticks out there and if now it can't be here then it goes back to being there. As writers all we can control is the release from self-imposed distraction. Creativity fights in non-writers to be released from bondage. In writers creativity is free as a result of the writer's self-control.

Gilbert Ryle wrote, "One's mind may be given readily and it may be given with zest. Not all control is oppression. Sometimes it is release." As writers we are born to convince. Not all of our convincing is manipulation and control. Sometimes to let yourself be convinced is to discover a greater release. Creativity is interdependent with the sensation of a greater release through freedom brought about with self-control.

Exercise #5

In a hospital room I lie with a thin cotton gown covering my swollen abdomen that has grown so out of proportion the rest of me looks gaunt and protruding. There are sounds in the night air in a hospital that stir you inside and force you into thoughts of your life gone by. You remember your life as a series mistakes, miscalculations and mistreatment.

There is something in the squeak of a nurse’s shoes; something that happens when she walks the halls pausing in doorways sometimes entering and sometimes not. A nurse’s job is to see to the welfare of your body. She breezes in and out of your room like a moving shadow on the wall. She shines like the full moon on a completely blackened sky. The nurse hovers around you breathing in your whispers, touching your wrist to see if your heart is still beating, rolling your forearm back and forth to check the IV, reaching toward the ceiling to adjust monitors that will tell her when your time has expired.

Nurses are angels dressed in pure eggshell white monitoring your body without thought of your soul. As you lie in your bed on a mattress covered in plastic, held in place by rails with the rubber mat pulling water out of your backside, lower spine and thighs you can do nothing but think. Think of your regrets, regrets of not having more relations with people, good people. You wish for more sober moments. Moments in which your mind was clear of the fear that drove every decision you ever made.

Fear, fear of being alone, fear of not being alone; fear of not being loved, fear of being loved; fear of having your own thoughts, fear of not having your own thoughts. Fear! Fear of not knowing who you are, fear of knowing exactly who you are.

I am afraid of everything. As I lay her in this hospital terminally ill I can see how foolish I was. How easy life would have been to live if I had the courage to be the person I was brought up to be. True courage is not turning your back on your up-bringing.

When the nurse leaves the room you are left with just yourself. She doesn’t talk to you or with you she only talks at you. But her presence still counts as someone being with you. Her body standing by your dying body keeps the loneliness at bay. She provides a reprieve. Again she is an angel in eggshell white. This time she is providing comfort beyond your body and she doesn’t even know it.

The emotion floods into you like an ocean wave rolls onto a sandy beach. The salt water floods into a ditch dug by the hands of children playing in the afternoon sun unaware of the pain that comes with adulthood. You were innocent like that once. Free of worry, free of regrets, free of thoughts that went further than the next game to play and who you are going to play the game with.

Game playing is the lifetime employer of an adult like me; an adult who lives without a sense or belief of who they are or where they came from. You play games for attention, for love, to stave off loneliness. You sell your soul to the highest bidder. Life becomes a game that makes you feel alive when all you want to do is die.

I’ve sold my soul by sleeping with men, old men, who handed me a college degree for fellatio and lunch at the “Y” anytime he desired because his intelligence couldn’t control the animal in him. I’ve sold my soul to women. Women who would hold me and tell me they love me and would let me nuzzle in their breasts and sometimes nurse on them as long as after I shared my vagina and pleasured theirs as well. I’ve sold my soul to alcohol and betrayed the memory of my father and drown whatever part of him lived in me. I’ve sold my soul to other’s beliefs because unlike my mother I could not stand up for what I believed in because I never really believed in anything.

I’ve sold my soul to the government for money and prestige near the end. And in the end I sold my soul for a good beating by a man who was a drunk like me; a man who needed attention like me, who needed not to be alone like me who held me hostage and beat me to control me. I sold my soul to this man so I wouldn’t be alone, but in this hospital room I am alone. What will my soul go for after my death? Will there be anything left to sell of me in the afterlife? Will there be an afterlife for me? I have no soul left to sell so I lie here alone thinking listening to the squeak of the nurse’s shoes as she comes to check to see if I am still alive. But I’m not alive. I’ve been dead for years.