Lost Perspective, Flailing About
The temperature dips into arctic chill territory for this part of the world and I can feel it, this house with corners that leak like a seive. I change the desk blotter this morning—the old one ratty with cat footprints and watermarks—and re-read the card I keep handy (rarely look at), Kerouac's essentials for modern prose. Some fun, funky stuff. Keep track every day the date emblazoned in yr morning and Like Proust, be an old teahead of time. Teahead, there's a word you don't see that often these days.
Then I re-read Ginsberg's Mind Writing Slogans the doug fir branches and wind chimes a chorus behind his words with the rousing wind. There is some comfort in knowing how many (most?) writers struggle. To be reminded of these words from John Keats:
"What quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in literature?...Negative capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason."
That's what my week has been: an irritable reaching. Can I only recognize it now seeing Keats' words? Seems every day I came to my writing desk wanting objectivity and conclusions, resolutions and recognition, to know, once and for all, what is good, when the work is done, is good enough. In the pea soup of my solitude and my hormones, I not only lose sight of but downright give up on the mystery. Everything is mistake and aggravation. Nothing sets or settles right. I suppose these ups and downs are inevitable, come with the territory. But it sure does a body ill to sit here day in and out and feel worthless, useless, talentless, uninspired, soulless. With me it isn't so much negative capability as negative incapacitation. Irrational striving. As if I can bend the forces of creativity, hell, even the universe to my own petty tyrannical will. You think by now I'd recognize the signs and be able to better deal with this. You think by now I'd remember the pattern and wake up.
