on writing

Last Saturday night, not this one, I found myself annexing a pad of paper and a pen at four in the morning. I chiselled the odd word onto a page. Sharp lines and square rounds. In the end, it helped me to get by. I remembered, as I did that, another night, when I had taken, for the only time in my life, too much acid. On that night, my brain had come to the conclusion that it was more likely than not that the night was never going to end. It reasoned, quite effectively, that I had trapped myself in some grotesque unter-world, peopled by nintendo freaks and the destruction of time as I knew it. In order to lend myself hope that the night would end, I again picked up a pad of paper and wrote, knowing that the knowledge of an increasing number of marks on the page determined the existence of time, and with it hope. My writing was rewarded by the onset of dawn and light filtering through the fir trees. I had no idea as I was writing of what the dawn would and indeed, a few hours later, did bring, but the point is - the writing did the trick. It kept me sane.

And so it hath continued. I frequently wish that writing brought me some kind of profit (by which I mean leeway to subsist), and it consistently fails to do that. In my grandfather's world (the australian brummie grandfather, the L in my initials) that would mean my writing is a redundant, indulgent pastime. However, it is a mistake to confuse the instinct to write with an instinct to subsistence, or even wealth. It might be, within our culture, that some can carve a living out of writing. But writers do not write for profit. Not on the bottom line. Levi Strauss argued, quite beautifully, and with a logic I have no time to investigate ahora, that writing originated from the need to control, demarcate and administrate (power). He might be right, but from my perspective, writing is enamoured with the quest for an idea of sanity and a desire for survival. If the reader will forgive me quoting Thomas Aquinas: Jamais me pagas ni un sou, mais jo se que para sobrevivir en este mundo rado, tengo que escribir.