On The Process of It

It is 4.30 in the morning and my self-appointed deadline (the real one having expired two weeks ago) for a project looms some two and a half hours away. At this exact moment, I am listening to “Einer Wird Kommen” from the operetta, Der Zarewitsch – considering my circumstances, growing up in the poor neighbourhood of Tucville Terrace, and my present ‘snug’ apartment on Durban Street, I can understand somewhat why the girl that was on my couch three days ago would laugh when I played some of my beloved opera for her.

I added a total of about two hundred words to two stories intended for Fictions, Volume 2 over the past half hour, which may be considered progress in a time when I have not had the breathing space to put down a sentence. This ephemeral, nameless time of night, sometime between when the karaoke club across the street closes and when the sun announces that the serious business of the day is about to begin, that is the time that I write the most or the best, when I birth whatever it is that has been gestating in my mind for so long.

Sometime within the past half hour, I wrote, among others, the following words:

“Fatherhood is this strange gift, something that is happiness and more with an inextricable grief at the very core of it, the spectre of the sadness of Laocoon…”

I like them – I fought hard for them and while I may delete them altogether some time in the future, I believe that I have the right to enjoy them now. The files for the project I am working on are all open in front of me and it is the simplest of things to analyse the information and edit and rewrite, yet this simplicity does not find its way to my fingertips pounding away upon the keyboard. What comes out instead, are these words I am writing now and those that I added to my stories before I started this.

The process behind the production of art is often an inconvenient one – this ideal coalesces slowly in that unnamable place between your heart and your brain, or which perhaps coexists simultaneous in both of them, and often when you should be doing something more profitable or ostensibly useful it forces its way out, strangling everything else.

I recall a conversation I had with the girl on my couch, about expression or execution being the only real existence of art, and that the ideals or ideas which exist within the artist do no matter if they are not communicated via whatever medium the artist works in, something with which she disagreed. At this point in time, I see the seductiveness of the idea of the superiority of the conjectural work, or the pure unexpressed idea – you can walk around with the perfect novel or poem or painting in your head and still function efficiently within the strict economy of everyday life because you are not bound by the irresistible drive to express and craft and redefine.

This drive is something which is common to all true artists. One of my favourite songs is “Breathe” by Anna Nalick, which captures the process and its implications in these words:

“2 am and I’m still awake writing this song;
if I get it out all on paper it’s no longer inside me,
threatening the life it belongs to…”

As I wrap this up it’s now almost an hour since I started writing it, and after the last full-stop is typed and the file is saved, I will go make myself some coffee and try to put in as much work as I can in the final hour that remains for my project to be done. Sometime during the day I will publish this via the push-button publishing that is the Internet and the girl on my couch will read it but not comment because she is shy and is afraid that she may be seen as the girl on my couch, or that she may be several of a long line of girls on my couch which may have been true sometime last year but not now. We will speak about it on the phone or in person, or maybe just on the phone because in person I find myself possessed of this irresistible urge to kiss her as if that kiss were a poem and her lips the living pages on which it yearns to be written.

And with this project hopefully finished, or this phase of it, maybe in 24 hours I will be up, with the bills paid, and so much pressure gone, and my son asleep under the net on the bed, and I will add hopefully a few thousand words to my stories while listening to la habanera from Carmen, “L’amour est un oiseau rebelle”, even though she finds it funny that I actually really do love opera.