The genius sits or lays on an Asian rug. He dreamed it up last night, its rich fabric, its outlandish colors and the shapes they made. They look Turkish to him, like the Nargilla he is smoking – elaborate and musky and strong-tasting.
“Pencil,” he commands. A pencil appears in his hand. It was always there.
“Paper,” he says. The symmetries and proportions of the room bend and flex, and then there is a wad of pages, crisp, not white, old papers like the ones used for old books that smell like books.
He thinks of war for a moment. He thinks about a man who hurt him. He wills those thoughts away and others come. In his mind while it wanders armies of men come into existence and leave it, plots tangle and untangle, market squares and back alleys and deserted beaches rise and descend. The din of the things in his mind can almost be heard in the quiet of the room — the cackling of the charcoal on the water-pipe and the minute noise of worlds born and destroyed.
At last he finds what he was looking for. His eyes focus. As he inhales, the room quietens. Even the piece of charcoal seems to burn with bated breath. He looks at his hand and moves his fingers: the pencil dances with them. He looks at the paper in his other hand. He puts his hands closer together.
As the pencil nears the paper, it hums.
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To be honest, hookahs and suchlike appurtenances bore me to bits. I wanted to reply to your C:\>etc. post, but that irksome No Comments feature got in my way.
What you wrote is really sad. Could it be that your Purgatory directory, instead of housing a variety of aborted projects, is itself one? Quite a metaphor for life; Morrissey couldn’t have put it better. Now I’ve always wondered whether the fact that we are so very similar in this respect is due to some maladie du siècle we both contracted in Herzlia, or whether the condition is more widespread than we are prepared to believe.
Your thoughts on the matter…?
Comment by Quibbling Elf 01.28.08 @ 1:13 amSorry about the no comments thing, I’m trying all these ways to fight blog-spammers.
Good points about abandoned projects. But no, it’s not a common curse we share (though, ten years back, while we were safely locked in our less-than-fair city, it was so appealing thinking like that: Herzelia is infecting our minds, it’s something it the water). I think the fact that we are similar in this respect is due to the fact we’re similar in many respects.
But I think abandonment is in fact the only constant thing in writing. It’s so hard to write well and the prize is so meager, there is simply put not enough driving power to make every piece of scribble a dividend-grossing product. Where there’s enough economic motivation to turn every piece of scribble into a product you get sitcoms. So perhaps abandoning is the way you make excellent writing thrive. I don’t know.
Comment by Jonathan Silber 01.31.08 @ 4:35 pmThough I think growing up in a suburb where the only intellectual stimulation available was the now defunct Star Cinema must have taken its toll, perhaps you’re right that I shouldn’t blame others for my cobwebby drawer. The University, by contrast, provides much more stimulation, but academic discourse is always in danger of becoming sterile: either you write about something and doom yourself to anonymity or you try your luck at writing something that exists for itself and risk becoming a stylographic masturbator.
Maybe sitcoms aren’t such a bad idea after all.
Comment by Quibbling Elf 01.31.08 @ 5:11 pmLeave a comment
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