There Will Be Blood...

This is the thing about the writing life, the artistic writing life. The better you are at something other than the writing that you know you've wrung from your heart, the more that things pulls you in, the more it provides the means for the other things in life that matter to exist.

I like to tell myself that what I do professionally is at least related to my writing. But that's skunt, and deep inside me I know it. Of course it looks the same, , but 'editorial services' goes beyond even the 'hack's hired prose' that Walcott complained about. It's as much akin to my literary work as a whorehouse mattress is to a marital bed - but like any whoredom it pays, and if you're experienced and know a couple tricks more than the average whore, you get to charge premium fucking rates, pun of course intended. And I'm damn good at it.

Maybe this is a confessional, therapeutic writing of the sort that those anachronistic hippies recommend in the place of real work, real writing, the deep shit that they can never access because it involves the psychic equivalent of plunging your hands deep into hot blood and entrails that ultimately always belong to you, and that's the same fucking place that "therapeutic writing" is intended to get you away from.

Tonight I watched the woman that I am going to marry (the triumph of hope, but love as well, over experience) collect third prize in the annual National Drawing competition, just weeks before her first solo exhibition opens at the National Art Gallery, and I found myself thinking that it might not be so bad after all to just submit, to continue the whoredom and fade into the shadow of her light, and the shadow of the light of my son and whatever brilliance he seems destined for.

Not that she would let me, but there is a certain seductive comfort in that thought, and I suppose the only thing that saved me from it was rereading a note sent to me from a friend I've never met in person, another writer, sent a few days ago, months after I had posted an excerpt of a story - one that I am still working on - in my Notes on Facebook. It reads in its entirety:

"just needed to tell you i finally read the excerpts from the paternity test (i sometimes wait to read something until i in a better place 'cause i know i'll like it and doh want interference) and your words are so beautiful. i like the excerpts (dis)ordered and fragmented as they are and assuming tha's intentional; love how these paragraphs tell the story. i'd love to see the finished txt to see if i feel differently, especially if not arranged the way you did in february... found myself crying so suddenly and unexpectedly as i read...

thank you.
walk good."

I responded with heartfelt gratitude, but in light of everything perhaps not gratitude enough. It is these miniscule acts of appreciation which individually serve to tip the balance, to awaken you from the lotus-dream of success, to show you that the journey is far from over and it is one that you are bound to travel, even to an uncertain end.

So this isn't therapy. It's the steeping of cold hands in lukewarm water, acclimatising my fingers for the heat of my own gut, and when I'm done I know that somewhere inside some ulcerous bleeding will be touched off, but since when has any great writing been bloodless?