~ Voiceless I am consumed by words; a mouthless vessel overflowing ever inward. ~
It is the starting that seems most to bring writing to a screeching halt. Ideas, concepts, dreams, swirl and stream like mercury. Words have tendencies more in touch with tar. While I can hardly speak for others (an act far too many find all too easily accomplished) I can with some degree of certitude speak for myself.
I do not like to write. I do not mind having written, and I adore having written well, but the actual act of composition is one I all too readily abhor.
Writing is “Thought”, at its most vulnerable, abandoned, helpless on the page. Words are ideas at their absolute smallest, cosmic contemplations trapped in a finite faltering frames. Endless potential reduced to an infinitesimal aspect of mortal understanding. To give life to a single word you must put to death all else the concept that gave it birth ever was or could have ever been. It must be bound and left, like Prometheus, to be gutted by time and critic in never ending cycles. Until, in some far flung future, it finds the blessed peace of ignoble ignorance and is, at last, allowed to fade forgotten into the ever softening silence of antiquity.
Even so it is one of the truly twisted tricks of existence that in order for these seemingly immortal aspects of the infinite to hold any real measure of meaning they must be made mortal. They must become real. In order for them to become anything they must first be stripped of nearly everything. In this way “Tree” the ever eternal ideal that was at once all trees and all that trees could ever be, becomes “a tree” or “the tree”, a place holder, an image. A single solitary instance nailed to a page by a pen, or hung in the vanishing vapors of a sentence written in the air. A wonder wrought into a word, a sacrifice of everything; to become, if only for an instance, something. Words whether spoken, or written, or carved in stone, are little more than dead ideals, the bones of an image once thought infinite.
Yet there is hope, for words were not first wove to enslave the infinite but to free it. For even the most endlessly expansive of ideas can only last as long as the mind that holds it. Here in lies the true treachery of words, for words cheat death itself by dying, by lunging from the thing that gave them life, the mind, into that which can offer little more than shallow grave for the paltry few squiggles and scrapes that hold the final finite remains of all they once were. Yet, within such a “Word” is not just the death of an idea or the bones of an ideal but the potential of resurrection so long as that word endures. In needed of only a mind to look upon it with understanding for the idea to rise reborn, not just anew but new. Similar in shades to what it once was but forever shaped and shifted by the mind that brought it back to life.
This is my real fear when it comes to laying down my thoughts in shrouds of ink. Not merely all that must be lost when committing to a single syllable or sentence, though that is part, but all that may be found that never was by a mind that knows too much of knowledge and too little of ignorance.
I hate writing, how could I not? When faced with the prospect of what you say never really being what you said. In a mind, in an idea, an ideal, you can find that perfect balance of understanding and ignorance. You can see forever even when you cannot see at all. All things are as you know them to be, all is free to change in an instant or hold strong for eternity. There is a great freedom in this and an even greater slavery. In the end we, you, I, must write, even if only on the inner paths of passing ears. We must write in sound and symbol. We must make concrete and solid our innermost ethereal thoughts and understanding. Because if we do not they can never be anymore than anything. To truly matter it is not enough that a thing be possible, it must actually be. A chance is nothing unless it is taken. Until it is written the greatest idea, the grandest ideal, is nothing but an absence of ink.