Last updated on 2 May 2020
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Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. — E.L Doctorow
There is no floodgate of prose. There is no muse tapping me on the shoulder and pouring beautiful words into my head. She was there, gently whispering to me as I rushed to snatch pieces of her genius in my fingertips. She was. Then she was gone.
It is a poor man’s fate, mine, to lose my only creative voice. It is unfair when one has so few gifts to steal one of the few things I can offer the world. Not that it is so great that masses will cry out, “Foul!” Maybe someone will notice there have been no recent essays with my byline in their email inbox, no thoughtful analyses of my predicaments. How did he find that door?
It is as if the well has run dry, the toy box of dreams is empty, drained amid all the unspectacular daily distractions of life–work, family, house stuff. In the past there had always been room for all these things and the writing; there was always at least a trickle of inspiration, of insight. And the words always came.
Perhaps my focus has been too much on doing all the other stuff of life too perfectly, or perfectly enough, to demand so much of my attention.
Not now. Perhaps my focus has been too much on doing all the other stuff of life too perfectly, or perfectly enough, to demand so much of my attention. Perhaps this is simply a low time, natural and inevitable in the life of anyone who aspires to the moniker “writer.” Don’t artists suffer stretches when their brushes move like brooms across the canvas, when what used to be the joyful play with color and light feels worse than paint-by-numbers, a burden, like a migraine and one wants to close the curtains, turn off the lights and curl into child’s pose until it passes?
There is a kind of dullness set in. Neither sunlight, nor fire, nor passion call the writer, the artist, the musician, the sculptor in this state. As if the source of one’s creative endeavors is swaddled in cotton from head to toe, we feel nothing, except the pangs of guilt and a total loss of identity. All edges are gone. Food is tasteless. Wine has no bouquet. Flowers and grass are gray. For if I am not a writer, an artist, a creative, what am I? What is left of my distinctly un-spectacular life? What am I contributing to the universal dialogue?
Or, is it better to write about it in some overly dramatic way hoping to bring pity to one’s self-absorbed, narcissistic, superficial approach to life?
Is it better to sit at the counter at a diner or in some cafe, drinking coffee after tea after latte in an endless fall to the bottom of depression? Or, is it better to write about it in some overly dramatic way hoping to bring pity to one’s self-absorbed, narcissistic, superficial approach to life?
The practical friend would argue, “dude’s just taking care of business,” and “he doesn’t have time for that stuff” as he pats the crestfallen creative on fragile sunken shoulders. “You just need to chill a little. You’ll be fine soon. Don’t worry.”
In 1978’s North Dallas Forty Nick Nolte’s Phil Elliot kneels next to running back Delma Huddle at the end of the last game of the season as Huddle is carried on a stretcher after suffering a monstrous tear of his hamstrings and then a ferocious hit by a linebacker. Nolte says to the whimpering Huddle. “It’s okay, Del. You’ll be back. You’ll be back Del,” even though everyone, including Nolte, knows he will not.
Where is this muse who has been so kind for so long? Where does the inspiration lay? Why, why has she so suddenly left?
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