Writer's Block

Yes, this feeling. I’ve millions of ideas without beginnings, without ends. My words putter out, flicker alive, putter out again, like amber street lamps that graze the edges of twilight and indulge the fervor of moths not nearly enough. We writers in the present must attempt to channel to text the memories which only come into being when past becomes present, when present becomes future—and this in essence is impossible to achieve. It’s a causality dilemma like the chicken or the egg: Which came first, the happening or the idea? And the answer: both, or neither, or never.

My mind is in a million things at once, in a perpetual paralysis of choice, a desperate reach from the real world to a place that does not exist beyond the mind itself, imponderable by the non-artist and too wide a gully for the artist. Italian countryside, drenched Seattle, red bicycles, a wrought-iron balcony, clementines browning like the windswept maples that line the promenade, home on the eighteenth floor of an apartment whose brick walls still smell like mold and sweat and smoke from an ocean away—tell me: Wherever do I start? Whatever do I choose? And even after I’ve found the place to which I can put my pen, how in the world do I convey something that is still in limbo between non-existence and existence, past and future? How do I give life to something once unalive? I am no scientist, no mother, no God; I am incapable of miracles as such the art of sentient writing demands of me. And thus the torpor, the agony, the despair—this, I say, is what I call writer’s block.