After Ezra K. — though this is not a post about ghost shoez.
I’ve been trying to write a big status rerum1 post ever since I stopped keeping a notebook two years ago, just after finishing university. (The last attempt devolved into a barely coherent theological treatise, the kind of thing one writes at two in the morning and reads at noon with the peculiar embarrassment reserved for overhearing oneself.) Not that I think anyone would have been interested in knowing what happened to me during those two (or three) years — the journals I had kept were for my own benefit, after all; still, the silence nagged me, and I kept arriving at the same conclusion whenever I tried to justify my failure to write anything to myself: namely, that the years I had failed to record were gone, in the worst sense of the word. I’ve always thought of photos and videos as paltry excuses for preserving memories, preferring the genuineness, the rawness of the written word (or maybe, if I were more honest, its malleability — its submission to my whims instead of those of the often ugly truth). Lately I’ve discovered a new excuse: that I was too busy living in the moment, and that it was better that way — so much so that my failure to write was not only excusable, but preferable.
Of course I’ve attempted various times to start writing again. There was a line from One Day, though, that kept popping into my head whenever I bought a new notebook, sniffing (resignedly) the lush cream-colored pages I knew I’d never fill: that maybe what I thought was a passion for writing was merely a ‘fetish for stationery.’ I never fully understood why I stopped, although I have a theory: my old writing was filled with angst (but what teenager’s isn’t); but slowly, imperceptibly, the angst was replaced by exhaustion — resignation. ‘I have become one of them,’ I found myself writing again and again2 throughout these three (or two) years, but I no longer have any idea what ‘them’ even means now, or whether my idea of the other ever made sense back when I thought I understood it.
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And maybe to write, in the manner of Pound, something so uppity as: The state of things here in London is, as I see it, as follows: I find Mr. Yeats the only poet worthy of serious study, &c. As to his English contemporaries, they are food, sometimes very good food, for anthologies. There are a number of men who have written a poem, or several poems, worth knowing and remembering, but they do not much concern the young artist studying the art of poetry. ↩