My tower provides sanctuary and protection. I have removed myself from ordinary life. It is a precious and solitary moment. I am by myself and beside myself in my exhilaration. I stand like a puppeteer above his puppets, and in my imagination I manipulate the people I see below me, like a puppet master who animates the passive instruments under his control. I stand alone and disturb the people below me, or so I fancy.
Words, words, words . . . on some days, I have the gift . . . I can make love out of words as a potter makes cups out of clay, love that overthrows empires, love that binds two hearts together come hellfire and brimstone . . . I can cause a riot in a nunnery -- a disturbance not to be dismissed . . . but on other days . . . I feel that I have lost my gift. It's as if my quill had broken. As if the organ of the imagination has dried up. As if the proud tower of my narrative talents has collapsed. Nothing comes. And my spirits suffer.
I live to observe and to express. My capacity for vigilant scrutiny and my talent for words, for felicitous locution, enlarge my inner repository of sensual experience and permit me to make that repository accessible to my audience.Whether my published communications unite me with others or disturb the equilibrium of their world, my own inner states are transformed thereby.
Today I am in a reflective mood. I've been thinking about desolation and transformation. I have been thinking about my current condition: my lone battle with the people, the critics, in my environment and beyond. I think about my loneliness, which rises to the level of despair at times, but, fortunately does not defeat me. I revel in my lonely struggle. I revel in my ability to disturb my immediate environment and the world beyond my imagination. I view my isolation and my defiance as virtues, the tests and marks of a higher morality.
My emotional inertness pains me, but my capacity to endure my suffering and my ability to transform my distress by means of expression, by means of words, emboldens my spirit. Something in my past must have disposed me to suffering, but at the same time prepared me to endure that very torment.
2 comments:
Shiv-- I had a friend who scored in the 99th percentile on the LSAT. You remind me of him in terms of intellectual functioning. I think you just might do it.
thanks for all those kind words. I'll let you know how it goes.
i still think you should take the initiative to fight your ailment. perhaps its hard for me, who can't percieve what a mental block ailment is like, to understand your difficulty. say i was told my the muscles in my left hand have atrophied, and that i will not be able to move it. my following question to the doc would be if the nerves leading into the arm still function, even the teeniest bit. if the answer's yes, i'd do everything -- and i mean everything, in my power to send a message to the arm that i wasn't going to tolerate it sitting on its fat backside.
you have the ablity to carry yourself over to a bar or a crowd. you have the ability to think -- though you might want to suppress thoughts that shock or scare people. and finally, you surely have the ability to communicate those thoughts effectively. what am i missing here? its all about control and will power, isnt it?
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