An Update

A few nights ago, I decided to do what I've never done before in my life. I opened up the short stories and novellas that I've been working on for the past two years - in some cases, longer - and showed them to someone.

For the first time, I didn't feel any sort of apprehension in showing my work in its rawest, most incomplete form; I wasn't concerned about having to offer any explanations, or apologies; I wasn't afraid of losing someone close because of the potential that they would be blind to what is essentially me at my most basic.

Writing is hard work. Literary writing is harder. But sustained literary writing in contemporary Guyana seems so impossible at times as to be foolhardy to even attempt. I can only imagine how Quixotic I appear to so many people, the pen I always hold in my hand, a lance, charging ahead on the increasingly frail Rocinante of my past achievements.

Around her however - this person I allowed into the virtual artist's studio that a few folders on my laptop constitute - this thing that I have set out to do achieves meaning again, even as ill-formed and transient as the ideas seem to me when I try to seem them from any perspective outside of my own head.

Not, perhaps, that I should have expected less. In the past two months I've come as close as one person can to another, I believe, in the sensing of thoughts, of a matching rhythm of emotion. My affairs, since the breakdown and eventual dissolution of my marriage, have been many. Take this fact as boast or confession if you will, my point is that I have spent the past two years seeking something I finally came to believe was irrevocably lost. Fortunately, I've been rescued from such bleakness of perspective.

What does this mean for my writing? Everything. When this daemon - cacoethes scribendi - grabs hold of you, all other ambitions and desires become, at least for a time, as nothing. But we are human - not the demiurges that this craft makes us imagine ourselves to be - and hence subject to the reality of our incompleteness, this gravity towards an other, and often the two states are incompatible.

It is a rare blessing, therefore, to find a companion who gets it, for whom there needs to be no other explanation other than the statement of creation in progress. There has been so much I've lost since the beginning of this endeavour, so much I've realised that I had never even possessed. You begin to build your life in the ignorance and arrogance of youth, on the foundation of faith in another, and when it crumbles to shit - if you are as self-assured and egotistical as I can be - you are faced ultimately with a reflection of your own personal failure, magnified, Ozymandias standing at the pedestal of his own statue in the wasteland.

Now, after a long time, writing again makes sense to me, this grand plan that I have conceived can now be put into operation again. I cannot promise to be less ambitious - artistic mediocrity and compromise are not within my nature. But after the ash has cleared, after another enormous night has past its darkest hour, I can see my path again.

I've set a tenuous deadline for the completion of Fictions, Volume 2 as August 1st, 2010, which is going to be some two years since the completion and launch of Volume 1. In about a month or so, I will be spending a considerable deal of time away from Georgetown, both teaching writing and finishing not only Volume 2, but a triptych of novellas as well.

For all those who've followed the literary adventures of this knight errant, thank you and I assure you that your attention will be rewarded. To, Dominique Hunter, thank you for the faith you've shown - I love you, and I'm working hard on my most ambitious artistic endeavour "Eric Cartman's Greatest Hits", although it may take a few decades or so to complete; I beg your continued patience until then.