The
end of the world
By
Randy Koch
Yesterday
I quit writing. I gave up. It was all over. My fingers
were dumb, my brain empty, my voice stopped. I had
nothing left to say and knew at that point that I’d
never write again. It had finally struck me: writer’s
block -- the dread condition that sets in like rigor
mortis, stiffens the writing muscles, and freezes
the confidence that once led you to think that you
had something to say, something that a reader somewhere
would find valuable. And I knew when I scribbled down
a half-page of unrelated ramblings for the third time
this week, when I drove in that last period, that
I was done and I would not write again.
I’ve
gone through dry spells before, a few weeks when I
didn’t write anything new because I was busy
teaching classes at LCC and going to Mary’s volleyball
or tennis matches or doing laundry or buying groceries
or watching television or grading papers or catching
up on my sleep. But no matter what, I always felt
that I was simply waiting and that even when I wasn’t
writing I was preparing to write again. Consciously
or subconsciously I was turning things over in my
mind, waiting for things to fall into place and form
connections that would provoke me to sit down at the
computer and draft something new -- a poem, an article,
a bit of fiction. After all, I am (as are all humans)
what the monster Grendel called, in John Gardner’s
novel which tells the Beowulf story from the monster’s
point of view, a "pattern maker." But yesterday
I felt like Grendel’s mother instead: "picking
through the bone pile, . . . troubled, . . . [having]
forgotten all language long ago, or maybe [having]
never known any." I was mute, and this time I
knew the condition was irreversible.
I’ve
faced different forms of this problem in the past.
Nearly 20 years ago I ran the Twin Cities Marathon
-- a 26.2-mile road race from downtown Minneapolis
to the State Capitol in St. Paul -- and I experienced
first-hand what I had read about in books on marathoning.
Other runners described hitting "the wall"
around the 17- or 18-mile marker, a point at which
the runner’s mind tells the body that it’s
had enough and it can’t go on. I was convinced
that I could not finish, that I was nuts to even attempt
a race of this distance, and that my body was simply
out of gas. My legs felt like rubber and my feet like
lead, my shoulders and knees ached, and my skin was
gritty with salt. All I could think of was jumping
into the cool, blue water of Lake Hiawatha or taking
a long, hot shower and crawling into bed for about
12 hours or trading places with the man in Bermuda
shorts sprawled out on a chaise lounge in his front
yard near Minnehaha Park. I wanted to do anything
but continue running. I slowed to a trot and then
to a walk. The only voice I heard was the one in my
head telling me to quit. A side stitch made me double
over. I tried to press it out with my fingers. Gradually
the ache passed, and when I straightened up and started
to move again, a woman and a young girl with her hair
in a ponytail stood near the front door of their small
house along the racecourse and clapped. They didn’t
know me, and I hadn’t realized they were watching,
but they saw the trouble I was in and they offered
me a hand and some encouraging words. I started to
move again until gradually I could run, and after
a slow mile or two I realized I only had 10K left
and that the finish line was just 40 minutes away
and that if I made it this far, I could certainly
make it to the end. And I did. "The wall"
is the runner’s equivalent of writer’s block,
but yesterday when I tried to write, I knew that what
stopped me was real and not just a psychological state
or a figment of my imagination or something brought
on by physical exertion.
It
wasn’t that I could not write words. Writer’s
block is much more than that. It’s that what
I wrote led me nowhere. I simply wrote words that
I had written before or that were dead-ends, emotional
and intellectual dead-ends. When I’m able to
write, I’m attached to the work and it carries
me on a wave of feeling and ideas. For the last couple
of weeks, however, I’ve been grounded on a sandbar
of my own past, drifting aimlessly in the horse latitudes
of what I’ve already said, treading in the water
of clichÈs and stock phrases, marooned -- crap,
here we go again.
I
was so desperately stuck and dumbfounded by all
the blank sheets of paper in the notebook I routinely
carry with me that I washed dishes in the sink even
though we have a dishwasher. I felt a patriotic duty
to watch all eight hours of the Super Bowl pre-game
show and the Super Bowl itself in addition to the
opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games and many of
the events, including curling, biathlon, and even
ice dancing. I made a commitment to my composition
students to have all their essays graded within three
days. And I felt a special kinship to Vegas’
Elvis impersonators since I realized I had been masquerading
as a writer for a long time, and finally my mask had
come off.
Harper
Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, must have experienced
something similar. She submitted the Mockingbird manuscript
to the J. B. Lippincott Company in 1957, was encouraged
to rewrite it, and for the next two and a half years
revised the book with the help of editor Tay Hohoff.
Then, in 1960, when Lee was 34 years old, the book
was published; it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961,
became an international bestseller and was adapted
for the big screen in 1962. It was, however, the only
book she ever published. And all I can conclude is
that she stopped writing, that the phenomenal success
of that one book made it impossible for her to try
to write another or that this one book said everything
that she felt the need to say. She had hit the wall
and was unable to write anything again. And I still
believe this is the case despite what she said in
an interview with Roy Newquist, which was published
in Counterpoint by Rand McNally in 1964: "Any
writer worth his salt writes to please himself. He
writes not to communicate with other people, but to
communicate more assuredly with himself. It’s
a self-exploratory operation that is endless. An exorcism
of not necessarily his demon, but of his divine discontent"
(www.chebucto.ns.ca/Culture/ HarperLee/roy.html).
She apparently was determined to continue writing,
though strictly for herself, and may have done so,
but I find it difficult to believe that anyone capable
of writing To Kill a Mockingbird, particularly at
such a young age, would not publish something else
had she continued to write. So yesterday, like Harper
Lee, I found any effort to communicate with myself
futile and without reward and the process of exploration
anything but "endless." I’d be grateful
for a demon to exorcise though a creature in my state
-- devoid of language, as Grendel’s mother surely
was -- would be ignorant of the concept of demons
and would, anyway, lack the language of chants and
oaths and prayers needed to exorcise him.
Sometimes
out of desperation I let the language lead me instead
of trying to lead the language. I choose words for
their rhythm or their rhyme and forget about making
meaning but focus on simply writing something, moving
from line to line until gradually an idea reveals
itself. This often has helped me overcome the stuckness
I feel, provided a glimpse of the possibility that
I could still speak, and sometimes even shown me what
I might but have not been able to say:
Writer’s Block
Herein lies the fault, about which
few speak and even less have heard:
somehow our prayers are answered when
we ask that ours be the last word.
And
now that I read this I can "see with absolute
clarity," as Anne Lamott says in her wonderful
book Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and
Life, "that it is total dog shit." Even
this reference to her and her chapter on "Writer’s
Block" is a weak attempt to find some solace
in my condition, to seek some advice for getting out
of this mess, and to put my mask back on by using
someone else’s words until mine come back. And
everyone else’s words look so good when I’m
all out. Anything to fill the page and reinforce the
funk I’m in because, like REM said, "It’s
the end of the world as we know it." Maybe not
theirs but certainly mine as a writer.
I could go on, of course, but I see that I have, like
Grendel’s mother, made another "ghastly
attempt to climb back up to speech" and -- here
I let out a chest-rattling roar -- that this word
is likely my last.
(Randy Koch teaches creative writing and English composition
at Laredo Community College, and is editor of LCC’s
La Frontera arts journal.)
Local
Writers
at Work
Dora
Flores, Raquel Valle SentÌes, and jesse g.
herrera recently read some of their work to students
at two assemblies at the Vidal M. TreviÒo School
of Communications and Fine Arts. These assemblies
were part of an effort by Lilia Castillo, VMT English
teacher, to encourage students to submit work to Tapestry,
the school’s literary magazine.
Armando E. Lopez, M.D., Norma Stephens Hannigan, MPH,
MS, RN, CS, and Sonia Rodriguez and Ivette Flores,
2001 grads of United High School, recently wrote an
article titled "Urolithiasis in Patients of a
Private Clinic in a U.S.-Mexico Border Community:
A Descriptive Study" which will appear in the
Journal of Border Health in April 2002.
Coming
Events
A reading featuring STWP teachers and students writing
for "Border Voices," a National Public Radio
Program, and an open mic will be held at the Laredo
Center for the Arts Friday, April 5, at 7:00 p.m.
Plans are being made for a representative from City
Hall to present a proclamation declaring April National
Poetry Month in Laredo. Organizer: Lucinda Farrokh
(721-5491).
Call
for Papers
The "Quinto Encuentro de Literatura Fronteriza:
Letras en el borde/Fifth Annual Gathering: Literature
on the Border" is an annual three-day colloquium
dedicated to the discussion and examination of "borders"
in Spanish language literature and culture. Using
the Texas/Mexico border as a springboard, this gathering
explores various manifestations of borders in the
Spanish-speaking world -- how they function as well
as how they are transgressed -- whether they are cultural,
national, sexual, musical, or literary. Special emphasis
is placed on creative writing, and writers are encouraged
to participate in the colloquium by reading their
literary works.
Please
send a brief bio and a 150-word abstract focused on
literature from the Mexican-U.S. border or any aspect
of border literature in the Spanish-speaking world
to conference co-coordinators Dr. William Nichols
(wnichols@tamiu.edu) and Dr. JosÈ Cardona-Lopez
(cardona@tamiu.edu) by March 26. Papers should be
limited to 10 pages and in Spanish. Creative writing
may be in Spanish, English, or a combination of the
two. Send to:
Dept.
of Languages
and Literature
Texas A&M
International University
5201 University Blvd.
Laredo, TX 78041-1900
fax (956) 326-2469
