This began as a short writing exercise/challenge. The idea, according to the prompt I followed, was to write for three minutes without stopping and take inspiration from a provided quote. What resulted from that exercise were some rapid-fire, stream-of-consciousness paragraphs that I have expanded and refined. It is likely the most autobiographical thing I’ve ever written, which is why I initially hesitated to publish it here. But I have, and I hope you enjoy it.
“Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper.”
Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing (1990)
I am a machine of infinite complexity. I have many functions but a singular purpose: I burn words on to pages.
I open my eyes, I open the top of my skull, and I allow nothing less than the world itself to flow into my brain. Impressions of what I sense, memories of what words others before me have written. So often I reach out my mind in search of darkness and monsters and the grim unknown. But sometimes I take in bright summer days and gently falling snow, starry skies and distant planets. The scent of flowers, the taste of coffee. Cats creeping across a lawn, hunting prey or perhaps just enjoying the sunlight. Stories from a hundred years ago, women in London buying flowers on a morning in June. My brain, which people say is wonderful but which I so often detest, absorbs and categorizes each scrap of thought. They seep into my veins and flow down to my hands, out through my fingers in bursts of frantic energy. Blood turning to ink. Words on a page, just like this one.
But the machine never seems to work as well as it should. For days at a time the words may not come. They stay frozen in my fingers or sloshing around the gears of my not-so-wonderful brain, refusing to take shape. Those are the days when I hate my futile attempts to burn words on to paper, and when I hate myself more for not trying. There are days I even hate to read, for I despair at the beautiful words set down by others, and I think that I should not call myself a writer after all. If a machine cannot fulfill its one purpose, what good is that machine?
The simple and perhaps obvious solution is to find a new purpose. But I cannot. If I left these words inside me, they would fill me up until they ate me alive and I collapsed into a mess of nothing. They wish to be on the page, and I wish to put them there.
So again I open my eyes, open the top of my skull, let the words bleed out through my fingers. Why do I keep working even when it hurts to bleed? Because I know in time this feeling will pass, that it will not hurt any longer, and I will learn to love my wonderful brain again.