What If? (Facing the Music)

What if you created a small, secret room, physical or spiritual, and you filled it with your ideas, evacuating it, as you went, of every unwanted intrusion? (You painted the walls a muted eggshell, hung curtains over the one window -- muslin perhaps, in two or three layers -- to admit the light only on your own terms, installed a small audio system, just adequate to the modern jazz and Beethoven sonatas -- all of them -- that you prefer when bent on an act of creation.) What if you didn't let it bother you, not really, that you hadn't yet found time to spend time in this room, but instead derived comfort from the thought that it was there, waiting, abiding, as you also waited, abided, resplendant in the faith that this room was inviolable, patient, welcoming, and that the purpose it served had no expiry? What if removing the distractions required months or years of burdensome effort, the labor more than once threatening to overcome you utterly, and still you persevered, sometimes moved near to weeping by your fatigue and lack of confidence in the wisdom of the endeavor, disinclined as you are to leaps of faith and recognizing in this enterprise the quintissential suspension of disbelief? And then what if you finally made the time to disappear into your little space, this shrine to your most heart-felt ambitions, and you felt nothing, no sense of triumph or satisaction, no inspiration, not even the backhanded compliment of disappointment, just . . . nothing.

On my little writing table, next to this computer, lie a legal pad and a steno pad, each documenting in sum several years of thoughts intended to move me toward any of a number of writing projects great and small. In a little blue paperweight my mother gave me, one with a diagonal slot for holding erect to view a small card or note, I have slid a scrap of paper from a pad that bears the name of my pre-law employer, making the pad (itself sitting on the farthest corner of the table hundreds of sheets unused) no fewer than four and a half years old. The idea it memorializes is younger. In full, in my near illegible script, I have written:

A guy keeps losing things -- wallet, keys, job? Why? We never find out but we find out other things.

Although I do not remember the impulse that led me to jot down those words, I can locate its origin at the nexus of two recent thoughts: first, that disturbing gaps in my memory have emerged of late, larger than those to which I've grown accustomed in my thirty-two years, lapses in background knowledge and failures of short-term retention so fundamental and inexplicable that it is physically painful when I discover another black hole where something I cared to revisit once had been stored; second, I seem to recall (or do I?), this was the first, and as it turned out last, story idea spawned by a sudden impulse to abandon the high arrogance of endeavoring to write something longer, a novel say, having written virtually no creditable short fiction, and nothing worth considering since college or soon thereafter, a decade ago.

There is no room, not really. But the impulse is real, and has been as palpable to me as a carrot before my nose as I've tried on three careers, excelled at one, and found only that one tolerable but still, somehow, unsatisfying, insufficiently romantic perhaps.

I eschew regret to the degree I can, usually with considerable success. Consequently, I have at great pains warded off the stray thoughts that sometimes incur that I may have made a grave mistake in acceding to my more practical side and my ever increasingly expensive tastes in choosing not simply to drop everything one day and say: I will write and I will make someone pay me to do so or I will starve. I will sing for my supper and someone somewhere is going to listen.

With the inception of this weblog, I thought to prod myself into action, my career fairly settled, my hours predictable, my life uncomplicated and comfortable, with the specter of more imminent unsatisfied expectations. I recognized -- self-knowledge being, quite possibly, the only perquisite of age, unfortunately offset by the countervailing stiffening of one's spine to the prospect of change in response to that knowledge -- that it would be enough for me to know that this site was out there, and that I had a few readers looking for my next post, to keep me showing up. This has proven true, with few infrequent exceptions. I misdiagnosed, however, my mind's capacity to skirt the rules, such as they are, and so it was only upon reflection that I realized that, far from spurring me to write in a way that moved me toward my familiar dream of Writing, this site instead moved me to talk.

Notwithstanding that there is no physical room, and futher notwithstanding the patent truth that one swallow does not make spring, there is a computer resting on a battered white table in the corner of my bedroom, and there has been a marathon push through closing on this house to moving in to settling into my new job and surviving the rigamarole of holiday obligations, all supposedly culminating in a night like last night, when my time was my own, nothing external called to me, and I could -- at last -- sit down to a white page in a quiet house and write.

Nothing came. Nothing at all. The few sentences I pecked out and summarily deleted were hollow, devoid of any visceral impulsion, dead on arrival. Years of aggregated ideas, which in certain whimsical moods seemed to coalesce into something grander, a major project of one sort or another, offered no counsel. I couldn't begin, not anywhere -- at the beginning, the middle. Indeed, to simply recite these various ideas inwardly to myself was to see them wither and collapse under their own weight. These were what I thought to comprise inspiration?

Of course, paradoxically, with greater self-knowledge comes greater compartmentalization, and with that a greater capacity for self-deception, one bureaucracy of thought burying another under red tape, phonecalls unreturned, a blizzard of forms designed only to guard jealously the issuing department's prerogatives. And it has occurred to me that perhaps that conditions under which I thought to write no longer obtain. Perhaps my mind is, indeed, stultified with law, crystallized like dried fruit. Perhaps I never had it, and have found sustenance only in an artfully preserved illusion, a fantasy that served me far more than its realization ever could.

I'm working on it. I'm having my people call their people. I am making discreet inquiries, invoking confidences and calling in favors hard-earned. This despot is not prepared to concede defeat to the functionaries he ought to have under his thumb.

But what if it's over, this idea of myself that's furnished the backdrop for so much of the action in my life? What if it's time to move on? How can I know?