The pen tempts me, so does the clacking of keys. I prefer the sound of the spacebar―almost an incomplete squeak. I find the enter key most annoying―just too loud to be a note.
I am most certain nobody has ever looked at anybody while they're typing; the way their fingers move in symmetry with the clickety-clacks of different keys. It's beautiful enough to fall in love.I feel a whirlwind swirling inside me every time I read. I feel compelled to slip into a meditative state and experience it, write it down, and exhaust myself as it fades from my remembrance. I wish this was rather permanent than episodic.
“To write well about the elegant world you have to know it and experience it to the depths of your being… what matters is not whether you love it or hate it, but only to be quite clear about your position regarding it.”
―Italo Calvino, Letters 1941–1985
My first writing (ten non-metrical lines on friendship) turned out to be a dinner-time joke. If that wasn't good enough to break my motivation, I wrote poems for every feeling, every major turn, every perspective of my adolescent mind―something I'd reduce to ashes but never let anyone read.
Not every perspective was put down in words; I have had to let go of words for the view―be completely immersed in the moment, confining it in the boundaries of visual poetry. As if a secret I was willing to pass on to the readers telepathically. Something that you read with your closed eyes.
Every word, every adjective, every idiom hold sentimental value. Someone once said to me: "Don't hold on to it. Once you are done writing. Forget about it. Don't attach yourself to it." It was not easy, to escape the urge to rewrite, replace, restructure words, phrases, pauses.
The longing for exquisite writing ceased with my fair acquaintance with The Death of the Author,
an essay by Roland Barthes. And so did diminish my search for self. I did learn that you can manifest something by simply writing it down, even if it's something you don't desire. But as fate would have it―
The willingness to write―be it a memoir, journal entry, or a life event―is gradually fading. It is mostly taken over by laziness. Countless hours of staring at the blank screen (or a blank page) with sleep floating in the eyes has never been romanticized before?
How writing is much like looking at something through a telescope―refracting the giant perspective of the search for self through mere words. How something distant, complex, imaginable can be condensed into something as simple as words through one's way of looking at the view.
Encasing a feeling, housing a memory, capturing fragrance between (virtual) pages―all that is written down can be felt again, remembered again, relived again. Something like a page, or a book, can encapsulate an era, or can even hold poetic boundlessness.
Leaving a trail of artistry: For someone in another time will marvel at the beauty the written words will ever hold...