My writing professor told me something about deadlines, once. “Deadlines are a metaphor for death” he said.
I’m not in school anymore. There is no homework. There are no deadlines. There’s no grade, no arbitrary standard against which to judge my success or my failure — no carrot dangling in front of this donkey’s face, and so, like an ass, I seem to have stopped along the path, stubbornly refusing to move forward against even my own best intentions and against my own good.
This is very unlike all the other times I have been done with school. Every other time I have finished or quit school, I’ve felt elated, immortal (for a while). It scares me a little. The decision to feel free is a powerful one and a dangerous one. There is a temptation to let freedom reign, that is, to let it run amok, either into excess or into oblivion, or both. I suppose we can all relate to that. We are all always free to do whatever we want. Then again, we are all always limited by the fact that we cannot do whatever we want forever. We’re free and we’re not free. And on the day freedom stops for me, I’ll be God damned (literally?) if I don’t make the best possible use of what I’ve got on this earth to make use of. For me, its writing.
I am writing now, but I can only write to say that I cannot. This is yet another pity party about writer’s block. To think! I could once pride myself for never having pity parties like that. I remember staying up nights, hammering out prose and poetry, just like that. It isn’t coming so easily these days.
In a little bit more than a month, I’ve been invited to give a public reading. This is something of a homecoming for me, to read in Shepherdstown after all those years of being away in college, getting a writing degree, supposedly honing my craft. I feel like all I really have to show for my time is a list of psychopathic girlfriends as long as my arm. I feel like my arms are too long. Of course, that’s not entirely true. I’ve earned a writing award, written a play and a novella, and I even had a job in publishing. (I’m trying to psych myself up here) What I have not done is prepare anything for this reading. I want to get up there and read something, something new, something un-academic, rather, post-academic. So far, I’m empty handed.
Woe is me with the writer’s block already. Here I go, indulging in self-loathing. To what end? For its own sake I suppose. I’ve reached the half-page mark, and I’ve told you what I would say, and I have said it. Now, it’s time to get to the point. I’m writing this as one of those prayers to the muses. I’m writing this as a form of catharsis, or exorcism, to get rid of that deathly fear that I fear along with this deadline I’m facing.
That’s all it is though, a deadline. It isn’t an assignment. For me, that has made all the difference lately. Usually I’d have some professor filling my head with shit, for hours and hours, so that I had no choice really but to have something to say. Sometimes I couldn’t get to the keyboard fast enough, I couldn’t stay there long enough to get it all out. My head is empty now. That’s the problem.
Since this is a prayer to the muses, then you, reading this, must be one of the muses. You, reading this, are also part of the audience. (I do hope you’ll attend the reading if you can). Maybe it would help to disregard altogether any kind of writerly or academic approach to the thing. Instead, I’ll be a DJ, and, like a DJ, I’ll take requests. Are there any requests?
When I go to social functions here at home, where the older crowd is present, they always want to know if I’m writing anything. I usually lie, or say that I am editing something. (I am, actually.) I blow them off and talk about the weather. The drinks flow and people circle the room shaking hands, examining laughter, cutting deals, whatever they do, and then, inevitably, one of them circumambulates back to me with some idea or other. “You should write about this,” or that, or the other thing. It’s always something. I always ignore it completely.
I’m starting to think that I shouldn’t ignore it. In life, as in college, its good to have people fill your head with things to write about.
Are there any requests?
Seriously, if you were one of those strange kind of gods that can have a poet at their command, what would you request?
