Monday, April 8, 2013

essay on writing


Writing

I’ve spent a good deal of my time writing and what has it got me?  Arrested and persecuted for writing out what I have swimming fast all over my raging brain.

Ever since I was young, I spent days writing of the summer months. I spent nights writing of the darker months.  I wrote everything I had in my heart, from the darkest, evilest desire, to the positive sunshine that helps souls grow into responsible men and competent women.

               At a young age, I discovered writing as a talent that God had given me.  I understood that I was to live the life of a writer, a poet, a philosopher and endure loneliness on a level most normal people never know about.  I wanted to be a mystic, someone with great words to read, someone to be remembered by many.

               There were many authors I emulated, too many for me to write in this place, but a sampling of Nietzsche, Camus, Kierkegaard, Saurraute, Eco, and so forth populated the shelves in my head.  These were the men and women who taught me everything about life and in turn about writing, which was my life.  If I had to make up my own synonyms, life and writing would go hand in hand.

               I saw the horrors some of these writers went through just to get published.  Some of them never even got any recognition when they were alive; a discovery of their genius sometimes came years after their own measly deaths.  So I told myself that I would witness those same horrors on a personal level.  Be careful what you wish for, because when it becomes actuality, those horrors are really quite horrendous.

               I came from a school of writing, which was a realism, that if I am to write something, I feel I have to experience those thoughts first hand so I would be able to write them for posterity.  Now there are lots of writers who can write without experiencing the life that they had wrote and made sound so real, and I am not saying that these writers are any less, but when I came to my own writing, if I was to write of being in solitary confinement, well I had to be in solitary confinement so I would be able to know the horrors of being locked up in solitary so I would know what I was writing about.  There was a writer who said that a day in solitary confinement was like a thousand years because one never knows the time, nor can one follow the daylight, for there were no windows to see outside to see it the sun was out punishing the workers with heat or if the moon was out lying and enticing the poets that were left to be fooled.  I always thought of that saying, but when I experienced the sad solitary confinement for my stupid self, I felt how slow time moved everywhere.  It was just like Einstein’s theory of relativity, time moved so slow for me, it did seem like each second was one hour in comparison.  It was like the hourglass of time was moving so slowly, where I could hear each granule of sand fall into the bottom part of the hourglass, which chimes so loud, my ear drums hurt with each fall of microscopic sand falling.

               Writing to me is a realism that I have to get to the bottom of.  Sort of like my own mystery novel and I am the detective with the task of solving the timeless crime.  I treated writing as my child, and everything I wrote, from pieces of poetry to never quite finished novels, I treated all my writing as if it, this materialistic paper was my own flesh and blood child.  They were not real fruit as God would have me to bloom, but I treated these words that came out of me as something special, as something that was childlike, or something of that sort.  Contrary to what most people think about me, I truly love everything that comes out of me.  Like you love your children, from the beginning spermazoa and egg fertilization, I love my children from the moment I set ink to paper.  They are my form of love and expression.  Where mothers speak well of their children even when they do nothing but harm other humans, for a mothers love, a true mother’s love runs so so deep.  My children have a freedom of speech and an even further deeper freedom of expression.  Just like you let your children grow and yet you still love them no matter what, even if they grow up to become murderers or mass hysteria terrorists, I too love all my children, even if they are born of blue or black ink.

               Be they good or bad, I still love my children, nevertheless.  Even the bad ones, which get me into trouble, I love with all my true heart.  They come from my body, they erupt from my brain, they are set loose from my fiery loins, and even from my own frail and battered heart.  Even in prison, I stand behind my terrible, but lovable words.  I , who have been sent to prison for writing bad poetry, for being a damn poetaster, I still love writing so much because it is the gift that God has given to me.

               Back to the question that was first asked.  What has writing got me?  Besides the worldly view of being imprisoned for writing what made me content, my writing has brought me a freedom so huge that I have no idea how to express this sentiment.  A great freedom.  Freedom of the soul, of the mind, of my heart.  What nothing in the world have ever brought me, writing had brought me understanding.  It has helped me to love those around me and it had helped me to comfort many around me.  Writing has brought me a means of expressing myself that no one can understand.  Still this does not deter me from writing, because writing helps me write down all my loose cannon thoughts, ready to blow up anywhere they are written or read.  Writing has helped me become more human because it is in writing that I can express myself and it is in writing that I can write down my thoughts and I can be compared to other writers that have had the same sentiment as me.  You see I am not really as lonely as I though, for I have become part of a family of writers in which we are all treated equally.  A true democratic Platonic state.

               Writing has brought me peace.  Peace to my turbulent soul, which never knew which way to row until I sat with all my pens and reams of paper and felt at ease at the overflowing of my sins I, could set to countless pages of writing.

               Writing has brought me creativity in a life that I thought was as dead as Edgar Allen Poe.  I am now able to sit and create new worlds of imaginations with the mere swish of my ball-point pen.

               But the greatest gift that writing has brought me is simply life.  Writing has helped me realize that I am a living and breathing person.  Writing has shown me that I am a human with an original mind of my own, and if it wasn’t for writing, I don’t know who I would be.  Writing have given me a purpose in my life, for writing has given me exactly that what I have been looking for; life.

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