There are two writers inside of me. The fearless one who says exactly what he wants and the nice and amiable one who says half of what he wants. Now the fearless one says some real bullshit sometimes and needs to be edited down, but every now and I let go and find myself writing something that makes sense, something that needs to be said. Often that happens in the late hours. When midnight rolls around and I am pissed off about the day and about ready to scream. Usually, I look back and cringe but sometimes that little bit of rage or despair or hope or joy hits right and I feel it is a shame to let it be buried back there among the other crap. So now, here is a little bit of midnight vomit. I liked it. Maybe you will too.
Life is too damn short to be about anything other than truth. Truth in writing, truth in speaking truth in intention. When you see a woman you need to tell her right then that you are attracted to her. When you feel the urge to speak you need to say what is on your mind right then and damn the consequences. Marcus Aurelius wrote to himself saying that he was already a dead man and that he should live the rest of his life as that dead man. Nothing else needs to be said here but I shall say it anyway. When we cling to the future, when we worry too much about what job we will get, what people will think about our writing, what people think about our work projects we never get around to showing people what we have. We never get around to really saying it all right then and there. We make excuses. We let our fear control us rather than going for it. We cling too much to life, we cling too much to the idea that we still have choices and we still have time but the truth is that we don’t. The truth is that we could die in the next year, in the next hour, in the next minute. The fucking grim reaper is coming for us. I see it now in the creeping lines coming into my face. I see it in the way my joints pop and the way I think about the past as if it were the life of another person, a dead person. I look back and I think about what could have been rather than what will be. The damnedest thing is that in that past when I was crippled by fear, I was always looking toward the future and what life would bring me. I was always considering my choices, considering what everyone else would think about my work. What if I made a mistake? What if I didn’t get things right? What if I failed? What if I chose the wrong path? What if I was canceled? And the days stretched on in my mind, hour after hour they ran away from me and now little time is left over for action. Little time is left over for truth because I was all in my head and never moving forward.
The Buddhists speak about being in the present and for years I never really understood what that meant. Maybe I still don’t because I don’t really believe in the present. I believe in action. I believe in leaning into life at a full tilt and letting it sweep you away. That is so hard to do when you are lost in your head. Even now I find myself trying to censor, trying to hold back from letting my fingers move the way they want to. I try to hold back from letting this become music, from letting this become something natural, something that flows rather than something that is painstakingly plotted and parsed and given over to formula and rule after rule after rule. Writing is not an act of mechanics. It is not an act of picking up all the right words and finding out the right formula to manipulate people with. Writing is an act of true communication or it is nothing. It is worthless, it is trite and soulless and cliché. Robert Greene writes that true art happens between one cliché and another and maybe that is because we can never try to find our own voice and develop our own voice. We are so busy trying to please everyone else.
Maybe Emily Dickinson had it right. Maybe the key to great art is to never show anyone what you’re doing. To keep it for yourself to let yourself be the best judge of your work, to develop it, and learn to judge it on your own. To develop your own standards and to judge for yourself whether it lives up or if it is garbage.
You have to go at it with everything you have. No more pussyfooting around. You have to get yourself out there and write with everything you have and let it be weird and let it be different and even let it be sloppy from time to time. Find the music buddy. Go after that music and find what it is that makes you you. I think it is the only thing left that we can do, and AI shows us this. It shows us what art is really supposed to be. If we lose the commercial aspect of it, then what is it? Why do we do it? Why do we keep going? Because it fulfills us. Because it guides us toward life because it shows us how to think and how to feel. Because it is a little bit of our soul out there on the page and it is a way to leave a small mark, to say “I have done something.” I have left a bit of myself for the world and I have been a part of things. Maybe I have not built a colosseum but what I have is more important than a colosseum. What I have is a small small thing, the same as that cinematographer who creates one beautiful shot of curtains flapping on an open window looking out over a snow-covered landscape. It is a moment that forces us to slow down, that reminds us of what life is supposed to be about, the glimpse of beauty between the hours of boredom and terror.
Oh how I itch to edit this! But alas, I must choose my battles.
This is Jeff Perryman, last survivor of the Nostromo, signing off.
