. Spinning .

My friend and professor, Steve Ersinghaus has hinted in a post on his weblog that I may finally have found my long-sought-after voice. I would point you to the post, but it’s embarrassing in its generousity as much as it is instructive in its definition of voice, so I shall excerpt it here:

“Voice is one of those unteachable elements of observation and telling and is interwoven into the thing in itself. It’s an impression, an echo, the personality of a speaker. A voice says things a particular way.”

Since the particular entry of mine that he has referenced was inspired again by my time sitting and staring at the backyard in the evening—as opposed to my early morning inspirations—I shall attempt to repeat the experiment to prove its hypothesis and will be heading out shortly again tonight. I may stay and wait for the words to write themselves in my mind This is much too important, too long a quest, too exciting to not follow up. If the voice is in me when I’m out there, that’s where I shall remain.

Sure hope the coyotes don’t eat me.

Some time around four a.m. I fell through time. Deja vu in future tense, I feel at home within the skin surrounding what I’m guessing is a soul. Or maybe just a mind that is a four-drawer vertical filing cabinet that squishes invisibly fitting in the furrows of a brain. Poke it with a probe, it sings; harder, it will cry. Memories are all together in one place with subfolders and strange labels: Good Experience, Bad Times, Corners Never Peeked Around, Slippery Slopes, and Thin Ice. Within are more divisions, maybe Never or If The Chance Comes Around Again. The drawers themselves, I notice now, are labeled too: Normal, Warp Speed, Just Get Through, and Don’t Go There. Shall I dig in, elbows deep, and read?

The moment my head touched the pillow I was asleep.

No, that’s a lie. First I cried.

It seems I still am chunking it, writing bits and pieces that are unrelated, scattered like a shotgun at the world. Perhaps my mind is wizened by age and not the wiser, unable to focus to any depth on more than a single topic. Freed a bit from months of slow and steady grieving, I try to do the things I’ve left undone. But these are tasks more automatic, practical; impossible to do, though, with shrouds of clouds within the brain.

Creativity, for me, means utter and complete absorption, dedication and delight to the exclusion of all else. When in its midst I do not sleep, it may instead be said I faint from lack of rest. Food is tasteless or forgotten as I pass through time not counted by the minutes, hours or days but flowing all from a beginning of a story to its end.

I must get back to that, that mental state of unawareness of the world.

Oh boy, oh joy. The mailman broughteth the new issue of Confrontation. Just when I’m feeling inadequate and uninnovative as a writer, imaginative and creative as the slowly slug. (slow + lowly = slowly, adj.)

Why doth the pain and depth of reality perceived not reach intoeth (love that one!) the mind from heart so seared by burning fires? The soul cannoteth (another good one!) help protect, its flimsy filmy wisps of thought would turn to smoke if held too near the flames.

But yea and verily I say unto you and self again in seeking, never straying from the light at end of darkened path: We must learn to read before we learn to write.

From Andy, at Older and Growing, an excerpt from a series he is posting called, Soul: Part I:

“There is but one essential prerequisite that must be fulfilled in order to be able to communicate, and it has very little to do with language or skill. It is simply that you or I have to have experienced something in the first place. To have something that we want to communicate. Truly experienced it, engaged in it with our whole selves, with an awareness that encompasses body, mind, heart and soul.”

I would think these brief essays will be of interest to all, and particularly to writers.