I am a pencil. I am a yellow pencil resting on top of a wooden table. I am energy in potentiality. For movement, I need an outside force. At least that's how I feel. And I am not proud of it.
Tonight, I find myself in a coffeeshop near my apartment. I usually bring some work here. At home, I could not work even if I force myself to. But tonight, I find myself in this coffeeshop without the usual stack of papers, without the usual laptop. I brought a book, though. Sontag. But I quickly put it down after a couple of pages.
I bring out my black notebook, instead and begin to write. I want to string thoughts together like notes in a 4/4 measure. But they come out in staccatos, spurts of some things, but nothing when taken as a whole. In a failed attempt to "en-word," I let my pen slide across the page in circles. I try to draw trees. A face. Doodling and sketching are not really my thing, I resign. The images produced do not give justice to the memory.
A friend, who had been writing her pleadings eyes me suspiciously and asks if there isn't anything that I was supposed to be doing. She's someone who sleeps two hours a day just to keep up with what the world hurls at her. She looks at me half amazed, half exasperated. I say there was. In fact, there really is. I have to finish two case studies that involves a lot of interviews and field work by the end of the month. But my pen continues in a rythmitic motion. Nevermind if it spews out nonsense. If others could only function properly by "cleaning the pipes" once in a while, I needed word masturbation.
In a results-oriented society, this kind of exercise is considered a folly only for those who have the luxury of time. But most of this society does not seem to understand that this is simply how some people know how to live, that they cannot live any other way.
And in the wee hours of the morning, while in between surfing and tearing myself away from the internet, I happen to stumble across
a college classmate's blog. Waps posted a piece written by one of our lit professors, Ms. Rica Bolipata-Santos which describes appropriately this condition. I post excerpts below:
Why I Write
Rica Bolipata-Santos"...My days are consumed by the one need to name moment to moment – enfleshing the world into words so that they may be turned in my hand, in my palm, and what it is that sits in my heart, can sit in my hand instead, and be thrown away into the sea; or kept in my pocket as keepsake. I walk the seashore of life and decide which rocks to keep, which to discard, which to put away so that I may mix and match at some later date; call upon a memory to authenticate a point; call upon a look I hit upon to explain character motivation; always, always keeping score.
Moment to moment I think to myself, there must be a word for this obliterating kind of joy. There must be a word for this travesty, or this tragedy, or this grief. What is the word at the center of my grief? This word is both identification and spell. If I can say the word, and only say the word, I shall be healed.
People wonder what it is a writer does and it is difficult to explain as it is a job that requires treading the line between real and imagined. Another writer-friend when newly-married complained once that everyone in the house she lived in with her husband would constantly ask her to do errands after all, “she wasn’t doing anything.” People want us to produce pages to prove that we have written. In writing, production and product are severely different things. I am asked often, ‘where you able to write?” And in my head I think, well…I was able to think, which is the lifeblood of all writing.
So, to many most of the time we really look like we’re doing nothing because part of writing is the hocus pocus part. For me, that requires hours of staring and sitting. It is ephemeral, the work of catching and matching words with experience. I need to keep still to do this. And sometimes, the opposite is true: I need to keep moving for the experience to catch me this time. There are those sought for moments when it just magically happens, when crystallization occurs. But when one writes long enough, one knows that the Muse also paces her gifts so that cannot always be relied upon.
I know the signs when I know I have hit upon something. There comes an incessant need to nest, i.e., to decorate, beautify or simply move furniture. I get weepy and for some strange reason, a British accent takes over and I mull over words and my tongue lolls around them like candy. I drive around Manila uttering sentences I’ve written, pondering on cadence and rhythm, the musician in me descending. My husband says I have this faraway look and cannot be reached. And eventually that voice comes to me and propels me to write. It commands me to document..."
