And, the Last (6)

I am beginning to realize two things about myself. The first is that I have become a writer. Now, I relaize that all this time I've thought myself a writer. Most of that was, sadly, desire and pretension more than it was actual fact. In looking back over the past years I have spent at the paper with a pencil, I see now that most of it was just a damn lot of complaining. I had no muse to which I answered; I had awkward teenaged pain. I had no true art; I had misery. I went on a painful lot about myself. My only characters were my crushes, I knew nothing about plot, and anything interesting I ever did conceive of writing went absolutely nowhere but the trash.

Half of my writings were movies I liked and, in my teenaged way, thought were "sexy". My journals were merely a private forum for private, angry thoughts. I was full of too much anger and no comprehension for creation. So I wrote when I was in pain.

I wasn't making a memoir or some unsigned letter to some unknown future, like I had hoped I was. I was writing down my emotions for propriety's sake. I may have had some minor vision of worlds that could have been created - but not much. I may have had some minor inclination of stories that could have been written - but not much. I occassionally saw strands of stories or theories of characters in everyday events - but they were not much.

Even after I began forming my "writing" for the public eye, I only tamed or shaped my angry rantings about a life I didn't really like living into a somewhat palatable form. Those I simply couldn't, I posted private and later decided that who gives a damn and let the world see my fire. But it was no fire of recreation, no phoenix rising from ashes. It was only the charred remains of a forrest that, in my own self-pitying way, I wanted others to know had existed.

It is only now, in the beginning and closing of this last notebook that I find myself faced with the conflict. It had been the dilemma of this notebook all along. So many entries cataloging my failures as an artist. So many angry words directed at my directionlessness. So much frustration over the fact that I had never actually written anything at all. How could I go on writing an angry diatribe about myself when I no longer had any interest in doing so? How could I concentrate on bitter rants when story after story clogged my brainwaves, filtering down into my pen without my wanting them to? How could I go on about the filth when the trash was being sifted for characters I had yet to meet?

And so the form began to change. Catalogs and outlines and formless babblings about progressions through introductions began to fill the lines - page after page after page. Until there was only room for the occassional philosophical treatice. Only room for a snippet here and there of an artist's thoughts on humanity or the state of the world. The others were expressed in voices not my own until the pressing of the muse would become too much to bear and a new world or new life or new set of regulations about a new society would emerge.

So now I see my muse has captured me. And these journals, these notebokks that I have spent my life collecting and hoping to fill will be dedicated to her. And she will sustain the effort. The old way, I see now, had no sustainability; the old way was sure to wear out. This new road is certain and endless. And I will walk it as long as she remains by me.

The other thing, I don't reall.