in spite of everything,
don't do it"
The recorded words of Charles Bukowski roll richly and ominously like thunder around and through us, spiking delicious waves of anticipation on my skin. We sit in semi-darkness, a huddled horseshoe of participants invited into the mercurial and spellbinding world of live performance. We are there to watch young writers turn their passion into a performative art: in one short hour we will enter many worlds.
When the organiser is introduced, the long and glittering list of her accomplishments starts to feel like so many Christmas ornaments piled upon a tree to create an ever-more spectacular celebration of season and memory and hope. I am therefore surprised when at last she steps onto the stage; she seems so slight and slender I am not sure how she manages to stand under the weight of so much light.
The evening is a success and I am delighted to be showered in so many thoughts, aspirations and imaginings. I am filled with awe for the capacity of these writers to be so multi-talented and so able to share their worlds in 3 dimensional space with us all. Their words are alive and electric.
I feel great happiness for them and also for myself. Even through my excitement I experience a welcome peace descending upon me lightly as a long-held dream wafts up and out through the blackened ceiling. I had thought I wanted to be one of them and could not understand my strange reluctance to take the necessary steps or my inexplicable inability to find the "right" supervisor. Now I understand and mentally I bless Charles Bukowski:
"if you're trying to write like somebody else,
forget about it."
I sit, wrapped in shadow, glorying in the magnificent dreams before me and saying goodbye to what was never truly mine. In its place I welcome the real gift. I don't want to learn to be clever or skilled. I don't need my thoughts to become a commercially or academically viable commodity. I do not even need, perhaps, to be understood. What I need is not recognition or validation or even the rewarding hope of contribution to something greater. Instead I need to unstem the waterfall and give way to the torrent of words that must pour forth in their season or remain silent in others. Consuming and spilling from me in a profusion of colour, sound and fury. I do not care if my words are of poor quality and of no interest to anyone but myself. They do not need to be read. If they find friends and fellow travellers I am enriched, but all that really matters is that they remain true and urgent and real. Unstoppable. Written only because they must.