To Teemer

One must, if its truly serious, as she is, understand the fundamental axioms of a writing career: that an idea will be forever famished by the ineptitude of the writer, which is herself, and that the writer is a radar, forever crying in despair at the prospect of her own idealistic hypothesis. Wow, wonderful, she thinks to herself, of course this story will bring me fame, fortune, love, recognition, lodging, etc. She is, after all, not a writer for the word, but a writer by the word, riding within the limitations of her systemic written dexterity.

She certainly tries to overwrite her limitations but when she stares at the screen or the blank sheet of paper or even the recording device what flows is an ingenious travel log of little men and little women and little inbetweeners and beyond worrying about their little problems. A microbe, she thinks, of which everything can be extrapolated. But then she does the opposite, and the skillful panorama is a gigantic compendium, the vastness of a land, a peoples, a country, a human condition and all the ants that have populated it work diligently in the machinery of the word factory. A whale, she thinks, of which individual experiences are subsequently assigned, fudging themselves into historical, and ahistorical why not, dramas.

And the ideas flow and she bites her nails forever. She is after all not only writing for herself, in tatters and influenced by one or many of the following: her tastes, her hunger, her style, her dislikes, her emotional well being, her self-esteem, her conception of plot, character, and themes, but also has to account for the mortal enemy of any writer. A reader, she thinks, a vilified creature, and for good reason, shrouded in mystery. Who was she writing for after all if every word meant less and less to somebody? Some people, she thinks, are not going to like this and every word that continues is going to make them even less. Is it the mass that walks and works every day the one that should sweat my ideas and discuss them or the people soaked in letters, diatribes, and delusions of writing importance, the ones I shall impale with clever twists and “voices of singular skill, weaving in and out of the page, crafting, becoming” and other such wonderful nonsense?

I am the writer who doesn’t know anything, she says and then corrects herself, I am the only writer who doesn’t know anything, and writes with a little dot by dot basis, of which it will come a word, of which will become a letter, of an alphabet, or a logogram, or perhaps even a cry for help and relief. I am, she says to herself, destined to write until I have nothing to say, until every word, if it ever was, is irrelevant, a new story comes and goes without a single utterance and the silence is unbearable. She drifts in and out of her own mind and ponders loudly of her options of which there are three that she rather repudiates, but are her only best options: to write, to write more, or to write even more. She chooses the first option to limit her writing as much as possible in hopes that it will wither away by itself, that the dream of a passage is only but a meticulous trickery that is best left unspoken, untouched by the soiled pestilence of human hands.

Months of degradation continue, until she shakes her head and comes to a resolve. She crouches in a corner, under a broken window where birds often preen, and begins to write a story that, unbeknownst to her, will bring her half of what she thinks she desires. In order of importance, these are: lodging, recognition, fortune, love, and fame, and with that she is going to realize that even half of what she dreams, and what she thinks she needs, and what she feels she needs, is just enough, or maybe not enough in the slightest, so that she never writes, or feels like writing, ever again.