I have this problem with drinking. When I drink, all hell break loose. The inhibitions that usually do a decent job of keeping a tab on the most wayward of my feelings, and I have many of them, gets incapacitated and the emotions come pouring out.
I am a thinker. I think a lot. Ordinary things don’t satisfy me. And greatness doesn’t come often. So, in those periods between epiphany and the daily grinds, I am usually a frustrated man. The primordial self-interest keeps me from running havoc. I still care for a lot of things to dash headlong towards the uncertain future of my dreams.
But when you have more skeletons in your closet, than there is space for them, then things must happen. The harder you try to seal it, all the while shoving more bones into it, the bigger the bang when it does burst. Research has it that those with a seemingly calm façade usually run riot when they drink. I will fall into that category any time of the day or night, for that matter.
It has not helped that all this time, while I knew I wanted more from life than it could possibly give, I have not known what it is that I want exactly. Now the best stuff, certainly the more sensational of them, are the once on reductio derangement. It always seemed to me that it must always needs be that a great writer must somehow be a little mad. Well I know that writing on ordinary stuffs wouldn’t make much of a writer because there isn’t much to write about in the first place. Greatness come when you have a cult following. That is more easily achieved if what one writes catch the eyeballs and grasp all attention by their throats. It is no rule of thump that the only way to greatness is by selling out to the lowest common denominator. But if there is greatness in writing ordinary stuffs, then I wouldn’t know it because the word of the writer’s greatness will be lost on me.
So, greatness is spread like a disease, from one person to another, from one mouth to another until it ravages like a wild fire. And as I said, this is best achieved by feeding people what they want to hear. Not what you really think, because it would be so damn humdrum that it won’t have the fuel to spark a fire, let alone spread it.
Moulded on these stuffs, hence I have come to believe that I am really such a man. That I must achieve this gibberish standards. When you feed dung, you get dung in return. What a person reads shape him and he wouldn’t even know it. Reading the most deluded of them all, Johnson and all of his clones, I have come to believe what is really nothing. I have somehow come to regard a gypsy phase in one’s life as an initiation into a writer’s journey. That life had better be a great adventure, with its escapades and improbable cascades, or let your dream of becoming a writer go to hell. A writer consciously let himself be dragged into the hope that at the end of it all, there will be a great book in store for him. It is as if one has to eat a poison to write about it.
I have let myself fall into that trap too. So most of my conscious life, I have a feeling of void. I mostly lived a secured life. What I didn’t know is that I was wanting to put myself into the predicament of uncertainty that is adventure just like every wannabe writer. Because I didn’t do it, I had a feeling that somehow I was not really a writer. My writing journey was somehow not complete. So I tried hard to put myself into those situation that are written about in the most widely read pieces. It caused more pain than pleasure, more insecurity and frustration than hope, but do that, I must. For writing is what I always knew I should be doing. And it does give me immense joy just to be able to put together words as sentences, sentences as compositions and hopefully, compositions into great works of literature in the times to come.
I know I have let myself be deluded. I was in a make-belief that there can be no decent writer. That there can be no great writer who is an ordinary bloke. Of course, I know there is a different kind of writing altogether. The academic writing. Though it is writing too, but there is no creativity in it. There is no soul to it. The transmission of facts is where it begins and where it ends. That would be an easy thing to do so long as you can be patient enough to put the facts together. So, I never adored this kind of people as writers though their art of fact mobilization is a marvel in itself.
So, now here I stand. Trying to be what I am not sure what I am. It would be of immense help to be able to be yourself, be an ordinary man and write about extraordinary things. That should be where greatness lie after all. One need not imitate your own artwork to be great. For if you are, then you are trying to perpetuate your own myth. Your work must speak for you. You need not try to match the creation in your work. That would be writing about things you do and you know. Where would imagination be if that were the case? I must try to be myself, whatever that means. That will be much less painful even if there were no great joy to it. If it is in me, it will come out.
I am not sure, if what I am harping on now is my own. In fact, I am not sure if I have an opinion of my own. I have read too many of those abstract literature that I can no longer trust in my own conviction and judgment lest they turn out to be the effects of indoctrination from all those years of exposure.
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