I don't know how to explain this compulsion for quiet, but I know it won't sit well with the shape my name takes in most people's mouths. I do silly, stupid things and get loud at awkward moments - how do I then justify the extensive periods I require of absence, to quench my depleted soul, and have I any right in even asking?
I've never known how to make sense of it, precisely, other than saying it's not like ordinary jobs. But is that even fair, at all?
I need my absence like I need my air, and can go long days, even weeks, without encountering another soul at all, and be happy in that. No, this is not about simplicity, nor about finding peace in my own sweet company. It's just, I'm stitched to myself, two splinter shards off the same mirror, and in this quarter of a century, have found I'm not such a threat as to need eliminating.
The rest, though, I go back and forth on.
I can't sit and write for twenty minutes while waiting for the pie to be done. And that makes little sense to some people who expect, mistakenly, that it's a job like any other. You chip away until you're done for the day, except not really. You need some time to go from the main gate, across the domain, into the property itself. And when you leave, you need a long, long absence from the world just to reassemble your thoughts.
I crave silence,then feel guilty for that.
And maybe it's the way society is structured that tells you you need to constantly be doing. Maybe it's knowing my life is finite, whereas the place I go to when I work is infinite twice over, and I just haven't yet learned how to make a peaceful transition from this to that.
I go all quiet inside myself, uninterested in external stimuli or people. I take comfort sometimes in music, but only because it's furnished with similar, abstract ideas that resonate with where I am, mentally.
I'm doing a bad job of making sense, but I really am trying my best, you know.
When you go to write, you could envision it like a long, overgrown field that begins in the beating core of the village. It's a strange thing, but you take one step, and then another, and then pretty soon, you're past the village's end, and losing yourself to the nothing.
When I write, I plunge into this great, complete absence of things, and it's beautiful and soothing at once. You don't realize how much you need to get away from the loud ignomity of life until you put fingers to keyboard (in my case, at least). Not to say that place remains quiet for long. What people don't understand about creative work is that it consumes you completely. As a brilliant Romanian writer put it,
"Writing seizes you intrinsically, barrs you from living. Not every job does. You light easily be loading coal into a truck, or signing administrative papers, while your mind runs free. Your own interior time, the only one that matters, belongs only to you. Only work completed towards a deeper vocation, and writing most of all, for its process is more complex, only such work seizes you definitively. Only the creative act demands this sacrifice of you..." (Mircea Eliade, "Noaptea de Sanziene")
It's giving something that no one sees you've given, which afterwards leaves you wishing to sit in silence a long time. And it's taken me years to understand how that works exactly. I just know, after writing, I'm no good for talking for about forty minutes. I need to be silent, with myself, to sit in this glorious absence of things, in the hope that that will help me to sufficiently replenish what I have lost.
I don't think we're used to viewing silence in this way, or quiet. Not doing anything is too often translated into wasted time. Silence is neglecting to say meaningful things. By myself included, make no mistake. I often feel guilty or small over the times in which I can not function and need my peace and isolation.
But the truth is, I work best in isolation, in quiet, in the absence of things and voices and names I did not choose to call. I require it constantly to fill this void that writing leaves behind inside me.
Perhaps others have different ways of reaching this place, but for me, it is writing, and only writing, that gets to lock the doors so completely. I liken it to asphyxiation, in a strange way. To something so primal and in a way violent it jolts you to your senses and strips away all the unnecessary bullshit that otherwise litters your interior landscape. It's a fantastic, frightening thing, but in these 26 years, I haven't yet found a better solution for it - Generally, but most of all if you're feeling overwhelmed and sinking slowly like a punctured balloon under the weight of trivial things, then more than ever you need creative work of some kind.
This week's #KISS prompt fascinated me, and elicited this writing. If you hurry, there's still time to contribute your own two cents.
