Symptomatic

I read a quote from an Irish author; I forget who it was. He said, "I'm not a writer with a drinking problem, but a drinker with a writing problem." It occurred to me that this sardonic admission of substance abuse could very well be said for most writers if not most artists in general. I will reserve my comments for writers. It seems that those who feel the need to write are a tortured lot. We are seeking to forget some horrendous wound, or perhaps just existence, we are trying to forget, so we leave our memories on paper. We leave them there so that we don't have to carry them around anymore. We leave them so that we can move on.

But what about those things that we cannot pen? Those wounds that will not go away. Those truths that we are too terrified to utter, even to ourselves, even in the solitude of our minds. To even think these things, to allow these maddening thoughts loose even within our own skulls would leave us with nothing but ashes. So we try to leave those memories in different places. We try to leave them in other people, we give them so many words, so many false words that merely skirt around the real issue. words words words. We scream them into pillows or underwater where the sounds is muffled. We try to leave them in paintings, but even the thinnest water colour obscures the true meaning. We try to play them out of instruments, but they are altered by the bending of notes. We try to leave them in jokes, ironic twists of the truth which show more than even we are aware of. We finally turn to substances. We try to leave our scars in them. We try to escape everything, ourselves, others, past, present, future...

This is why most writers are the type who can sardonically say that they are drinkers with writing problems. The drinking isn't the problem, it is only a sympotom of being someone who is compelled to write, who needs to forget, but is incapable of doing so, someone whose very being is torture, whose very life is painful.

I wish that these words were what I wanted to say, but they cannot be, they are a lie, a facade of what is really going on...