Fleh

Banging through my head when I sit in the bath are the things I wish to say. I have speeches and dialogues rehearsed til I know them by heart, I have been brought to tears through the things I want to say, to write, to make other people understand. But rarely does it become matter. I say the words, but words don’t rest, they are there and then they are gone, and unless someone else hears them, they mightn’t have existed at all. I hold the pen, but it feels unpleasantly clunky and tangled in my hands, and I can’t quite get the flow from my head to my hand. Imagine blood flowing from the brain, down the arm and through the pen in words, scratched in narrow lines on the page. That’s what I like to picture.

The truth is, as my lecturer put it, is that poets and writers are not struck with impassioned and spontaneous brilliance, viscerally entrenching their work with the very physical and emotional core of their being. There is a process involved, a systematic and quite mathematical one. Examination, analysis and reduction of the material, a written page analysed and thought about, and then a re-examination, analysis and reduction of the material on the page. Followed by yet another picking over and deducting and adding up and taking away of lines, thoughts and so on. The poems, stories, songs, whatever are still most likely inspired by the writer’s own experiences, or at least something they’ve seen that has bred thought, otherwise they wouldn’t have such complicated views and feelings on the matter, or an interest to represent them. But the persistant criticising of the material, the selecting of emotions to portray, or the decision to leave out this thought because it doesn’t fit the metre in this form, but to include it in a different way which actually casts a very different light on the true tone, all this adds up to a sensation of an accountant getting the numbers to add up.

Quite cold hearted really, yes?