The Color of My Ink

An unpublished meditation on the compulsion to write.

Unlike Rome or McDonalds, my desire to write has no creation myth. I did not grow up eating bowls of alphabet soup, soaking my subconscious in starchy spoonfuls of vowels and consonants. A healthy family, a divorce—largely incomprehensible to a younger me at age eight—notwithstanding,  ensured a distinct lack of tragedy during my years of crystallization. No World Wars, no exciting threats of a global, mutually assured holocaust ever made itself known to me in the grey, drizzly streets of Central London. My encounter with writing was largely practical, thoroughly un-sexy and devoid of the alluring mysticism of predetermination or destiny. 

I wrote first—like most everyone in the beginning—as a tool, a practical construct to facilitate simple forms of human-to-human communication: my name on tests, a postcard to Mom when I fell ill on a school trip and missed home. The early medium of my personal projection into the world was speech, the cheap and dirty grunt in the trenches of daily existence. It was so easy and fluid and intuitive. It took no time, required little effort, a largely passive practice where everything is put on display as is, the velvet cover whipped off the latest invention before the announcer has even a moment to tease the crowd, incite anticipation or stoke intrigue. Speaking was sexy. I said fuck loudly on the school bus and quietly under my breath. But although I enjoyed the rapidity which speech afforded and its almost zilch cosmic permanence, I found myself morally and self-reflectively hosed. Speaking was steeped in people. Indeed a dialogue—by definition—must involve more than one person. So, I considered the monologue as a path to my personal cultivation, but too much of that means you are soon prescribed things by men who are scrubbed to an aseptic glow. Writing presented an alternative to speaking. I wanted to write to confront myself, to learn how to self-assess, alone. 

As more ink went down and more of me started to come up, the initial pursuit of writing as a simple means to introspect began to become more complex, though. Firstly, at around age thirteen, I developed an aesthetic appreciation for the world. That building is not just realized—empty space one day, office space the next. Immeasurable foresight went into that: planning, calculation and judgements of beauty. Soon, I began to apply the same weblike thinking to words. I paid attention to their sounds given different organization. I started to mess with their flow and direction, their pulse and meter. I was honing my audiophilia outside of my music collection, and inside my internal dictionary. 

Next came a ramping up of my own skepticism and an urge to explore my relationship to not only myself, but also to you and everyone else. I began setting myself extra-curricular assignments, normally in the form of vague exploratory questions. The more history I absorbed, the more experience I received bow-tied and wrapped on my birthdays, the more I attempted to summarize my generation and zeitgeist. Broadly, how would we, the materially comfortable denizens of the early twenty-first century, be categorized? Less broadly, what do I enjoy and what motivates me. This quasi-journalistic lens which I developed kept naturally setting me assignments as it tinted my worldview a darker and less outrightly happy color. Naturally, with examination comes the realization that things are not always what they seem. Politicians grow scales. The silver lining is harder to find. The bright side of life loses its glow somewhat.  

And so now of course that I've forwarded possible reasons as to why writing ever gained traction on me, I’ve reversed my central thesis that I have no creation myth. I’ve proven exactly that which I set out to disprove; that writing does not involve ‘the other’ or ‘the ether’ or that men and women do not become possessed, inhabited for life from a young age by some spirit which demands only a coherent arrangement of ink on page, sentence next to sentence. The hackneyed position that good writing is, at least at the higher levels, achievable only by the possessed, is something that has always disturbed me. That the best writers write simply because they have to is, to me, a sad commentary on both human ability and on writing’s true nature. I never write because I have to. I write based on conscious, three-dimensional real-life choice. I enjoy the difficulty of the craft, moments of the day when I can access my inner well; normally watertight and sealed when not in solitary contemplation, the music off, the room silent, the page as blank and white as ever. 

Now, more than previously, I write to capture moments and snapshots of the world. The challenge, especially when it comes to words, is that they were not tailor made to represent life as is. They have no pictorial form. Their effectiveness at describing a scene is limited to a writer’s skill and the imagination and willingness of the reader to think. If we wanted to be perfectly accurate, that is, take a literal picture of life, we’d use a camera—or better yet—a video-camera. But these are remarkably easy mediums to wield effectively—at the very least they involve a human being with the dexterity to press a button. Writing as a capturing method is far more elusive, a remarkably difficult art, and ostensibly the least effective medium by which to convey life. But while film and camera can show us what is literal with remarkable clarity, only the printed word can elucidate immediate emotion, feelings. A good sentence or paragraph conveys these intangible sensations on an intuitive level. I strive to capture this in any story I compose or any question I attempt to answer; the feeling of what it meant and felt like to be alive in that moment, in that part of the world, wherever it was, whatever I felt, whatever it meant.