I'm bad at blogging. I admit it. Even worse at blogging when I try to do structure in my content. (Like this blog with the links to things. I'd been hoping to add pictures, and eventually audio (and in fact downloaded Audacity to try to start doing some audio stuff) but this blog keeps falling by the wayside. It's become habit in fact to come here and blog about how I'm not blogging.
Can we pretend that's meta-content, and that I'm actually doing something terribly meaningful and artistic here?
My keyboard is really really dirty, also. In case you were wondering.
Anyway, I have stuff to do, so here's another non-entry.
I have been told in the past that I have the ability to climb into (your) head and take up residence. That I know what buttons of (yours) to push, and that I can do so with remarkable skill, even tending to hit them in the right order. If sex was a game of Simon, I'd perpetually have high score.
Sounds arrogant huh?
I could tell you how I do it. It's no great secret, except the secret of observation. I watch you, I listen to you, I say things and see which ones make your eyes light up, and which ones make you clench your hands in secret fists. I save those for later. But it's not such a challenge, no one is as complicated as they think they are when it comes to sex.
And that includes me.
My buttons are not so far below the surface, and yet they seem miles away from you. The things I want are too complicated, too hard, too much, for...you. And so I sit, and simmer, knowing I gave the best of what I could to you, to have it held just out of reach. I can't have what I want, and I can't make myself want what I have.
How long will I have to linger in your head, before I can let go?
I'm a writer. An escribitionist if you will. To keep notebooks like Kafka, or Fitzgerald even. To extract the essential natures of things and people into my fiction. To write something resembling a memoir of our time. To dwell in the minutia of life and find a way to make it entertain and inform.
And yet, as a fictionalist, I am coming into conflict with that ideal. In a story which is not even true, I find myself shying away from finding an audience. I find myself closing in, to hide something I am scrawling. Whenever it gets too close, when I come to the edge of the transgressive, I find myself tearing off the pages with the perversity, and tossing them into the intellectual furnace. I watch with a sense of sorrow and distress as they burn away, the ink on the mental paper sometimes lingering faintly in the ash.
But the self-censor keeps working overtime, and so some of my best works remain private. Not for display here, unless the family friendly requirements of the site somehow change. They have no curio cabinet into which to fit, no backlit shadowbox to show them off. It is enough to make me pine wistfully.
I wonder if I have the courage, the fortitude, the endurance to be a Lovecraft or a Wilde. A Nin, or a Miller. Or if to even ask myself that is to indulge in acts of ego. Would my writing about an underage fictional character having sex be art? Or just an act of refusal to let go of something I didn't have control of when it happened?
The stories that I have in my head are sometimes stories I worry about sharing. But I think there's a place between the place I'm afraid of going, and the place where you (the reader) are entirely comfortable. I want, as a writer, to make you squirm in your seat a little. To make you wonder what things are in your heart, what things you would do in an entirely consequence free world.
"Another guest that winter night
Flashed back from lustrous eyes the light.
Unmarked by time, and yet not young,
The honeyed music of her tongue
And words of meekness scarcely told
A nature passionate and bold,
Strong, self-concentred, spurning guide,
Its milder features dwarfed beside
Her unbent will’s majestic pride.
She sat among us, at the best,
A not unfeared, half-welcome guest,
Rebuking with her cultured phrase
Our homeliness of words and ways.
A certain pard-like, treacherous grace
Swayed the lithe limbs and dropped the lash,
Lent the white teeth their dazzling flash;
And under low brows, black with night,
Rayed out at times a dangerous light;
The sharp heat-lightnings of her face
Presaging ill to him whom Fate
Condemned to share her love or hate.
A woman tropical, intense
In thought and act, in soul and sense,
She blended in a like degree
The vixen and the devotee,
Revealing with each freak or feint
The temper of Petruchio’s Kate,
The raptures of Siena’s saint.
Her tapering hand and rounded wrist
Had facile power to form a fist;
The warm, dark languish of her eyes
Was never safe from wrath’s surprise.
Brows saintly calm and lips devout
Knew every change of scowl and pout;
And the sweet voice had notes more high
And shrill for social battle-cry."
-- From "Snow-Bound", John Greenleaf Whittier
