Facing the Blank Page

Negativity (Darkness)

Photo by Patrick McManaman on Unsplash

*I usually don’t post twice in one day. Most often I post 1-2 times per week. But I couldn’t resist this one :) Free for all. Enjoy. Consider going paid for $40/year or $5/month to read all my writing.

Almost all of my writing seems to contain darkness. I’m not sure exactly where this comes from, to be honest. My childhood feelings of emotional abandonment, perhaps. But neither my mother nor my father (RIP) were/are particularly dark souls. I suppose my unique inherent nature is obviously part of it, wherever that precisely stems from. We start in darkness, in the womb. That’s something.

Then there’s my lurid, nefarious past: The drinking, the fast lifestyle, the women, the violence, the raging confusion. Anger started young. Feeling topsy-turvy, upside down before that. Always sensitive, aggressive, needy, clingy, yet fiercely independent.

When I write it’s most often in the mid-morning. I do my usual morning routine—Irish Breakfast tea, smoothie, reading—and then step into my home office and sit down at the desk and turn my thin Acer laptop on and sit there as the machine loudly blinks to life, that surging sound of heat from the thing like some sort of artificial wolf cry.

After a few minutes I am faced with the blank page of the screen. A Word.doc. Flat, white, empty, with that little black scroller blinking like a god’s eye, seeming almost to taunt me.

This is the point where creation must begin. This is what Art is; creation. From nothing: Something; from chaos, order. The symbolic cosmos shifting from total anarchy to organized sanity. Something like that.

I must sit and face the screen and glance at my black, old keyboard with the white letters so faded that some of them are gone now. It takes me back to my high school days in 1999, learning how to properly type. I was always bad at it. Just like I was always “bad” at school. I excelled in English class, and History, Civics, but none of that mattered because formal education was not my priority.

Booze, punk rock, cars, girls and danger were the signposts of my torrid youth. Adventure. Cynicism. Attitude. Rebellion, both inner and outer. Joy. The glory of being drunk, wind whipping my face, car going 100 MPH, solitude and yet also with my crew, my clique of misfit boys. A Catholic college-prep Lord of the Flies.

But back to here, now, the sadistic Blank Page. Facing it.

Writing into nothing, into the void, requires great courage and much faith. Courage that what you’re attempting to create has some inherent worth. Faith that you’ll somehow succeed at manifesting order from the chaos that is intrinsic to the human condition, to the dark misty mystery that is our collective, unlikely existence on this whirling, spinning planet.

Inside myself I carry a multitude of planets, as we all do. A rich inner life which tastes vaguely of dark chocolate. Flowers of the dark night; flowers bursting from the salient soul.

I sit there in my swivel chair, my old leather jacket draped over the back—the jacket I never wear anymore—and I press my fingers to the keyboard and I try to feel instead of think. My gift—and downfall—is my mind, my cognitive fortress and jail. I can think my way into or out of anything, and yet I never fully escape it. What I always truly need is the ability to let go, snap the chains made of shadow which are perennially clamped around my ankles, wrists, neck. I am some wild, bulbous, bilious beast. I stand on two legs—Homo Erectus—and scream the wolf song of my heritage.

Facing The Blank Page I enter into my subconscious. All my craving—for fame, for money, for love, for notoriety, for acceptance, for freedom, for life, for death—spews out of me via my fingers, and out onto the whiteness of the paternal page. What I seek is seeking me; of course it is. And what am I seeking? (Therefore, what is seeking me?) Forgiveness. Forgiveness. I forgive myself by writing down the bones of my experience in this world. I leave interior fossils of my tortured, warm soul.

Life is a dampness I cannot escape. A wet savior, yet also a curse. I want to live, and for 1,000 years. And yet death seems to lull me to sleep each night as I read. Thinking isn’t exactly the enemy. Neither is life. Nor death. Expectations seem to be the major tepid curse. We expect and we fall. People fail us because we hold them up to be bigger, better, more perfect than they actually are. We’re all hopelessly wounded, flawed, afraid, uncertain, unglued, and capable of great harm and great love.

These inner monsters come out through my fingertips onto the screen, devastating the whiteness of the sordid blank page. The more black letters cover the whiteness the better, the safer I feel. It’s not about color; it’s about sanity, safety, reprieve. Art is creation, as I said. Life is continuance. Biology is just one lens through which we can observe Homo Sapiens. Our cognitive revolution, 70,000 years ago, allowed our species to self-reflect, to consider, to ponder deeply.

But when I write, slashing my symbolic machete against the thick green jungle of whiteness ahead of me, I free myself—perhaps ironically—from this need to self-reflect and think. Instead I release; instead I open up and bleed, as both Iggy Pop and Hemingway said. Instead I dare to face the whiteness and cut, feel, vomit, wretch my spiritual organs out of my bowels and hurl them into the sea of mystery. Blood spatters the windows of my being.

But I avoid the existential crisis that is aliveness. Soft, hard, sensitive and mean. Loving, warm, pulsing and free. I am all. I am everything. I am creation itself.

I throw everything I’ve got, from within, onto the whiteness.

I destroy to begin.