This Is What It’s Like Sometimes
This is what it’s like sometimes. It’s like something you can’t get out of your mind. It’s like an obsession, an itch, a tick. It’s like needing to chew a sore place on your tongue. It’s like blinking hard to feel the pain of a sty. It’s like having to pick at the loose skin by your fingernail.
There is a thing in your mind. Something has separated itself from the flow of ideas and caught your attention. “Write about it,” a little voice says. “Write about it. Write about it. Write about it. Write about it.”
You have no idea what will come of this. Your filters are shimmering like they are about to disappear into another dimension. It’s not that you have become brave; it’s that you have lost the ability to care. You might say anything. All you know is that you must write about it. And this need will not go away until you give in.
Write about it!
“What are you thinking about?” your wife asks, startling you. Somehow it seems wrong that there are other people in the world. Her question has no meaning. Communication has become a lost art. Your mind has a stutter.
How speak I words? Why speak I words?
“Oh, um…nothing.” You shake your head as though that might bring you back to the world. “Just, I was…Uh...just only thinking.”
Write about it!
At this moment, there is nothing in your life more important to you than this impulse, not your religion, not your wife, not even your children. Like the poor, these will be with you always, but this inspiration will never come again.
Write about it!
You close your eyes and sway at the keyboard like Stevie Wonder. “What am I thinking? What am I knowing? What am I feeling? If this thought were an object, how would it move in the world? Does it remind me of anything I’ve known before? Where is this taking me? What does it want from me?”
Write about it!
And then the focus comes, like a drug. Oh, yeah! You who have never been able to pay attention to anything suddenly find your whole world constricted to one moment in time. There is nothing for you but this moment.
“Bring me my anger. Bring me my pain. Bring me my sorrow. Bring me my joy and my memories. Bring it all. Bring it. Bring me everything I have ever known but cannot remember.”
The tick-tack sounds of your keyboard are like the grunts of a shaman on peyote. This is a camp meeting. This is a tent revival. This is getting the Spirit. This is seeing God. This is the moment and there are no other moments. Your eyes have been opened and you can see. You see into everyone’s heart. You are all the characters in the story. You have popped the clutch and jump-started some kind of primal memory. You know things you never knew before.
You own nothing. You deserve nothing. You are nothing. You have found all of your words lying by the side of the road. You laugh at pride because pride is irrelevant. All that you have has been given to you. You are a wanderer and a pilgrim and a holy man, also a wild man and a lost man. You have a vague sense that this is going to cost you, but this is the pearl of great price. You do not care what it costs.
And then you are done. You emerge from your focus and look at what has come out of you. You wish the work were finished, but the work is only beginning. Now come the hours. Now come the pain and sacrifice. Now you must return to the diluted focus and lesser creativity of this world. Now you must turn what lies before you into something that other people can understand. Impossible!
You’d like to stay in the moment, but that’s not what writing is. Writing is working hard so that you can tell the story of that moment.
rlp
10:26:35 PM 
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