The Well
or, thoughts on capacity
I don’t know where I am at the moment. There’s a certain malaise, a—how does one say it?—apathy that permeates my blood. It’s been here a while, drifting through my skin, percolating the heart and veins and lungs, and despite my continued respiration I find it is ever-present. I see it in the stark blue mornings. I hear it in the waves. I even smell it in the faint and pleasant scent wafting from the jasmine that spills across the balcony. What is it, exactly? What is this feeling that spreads and that right now—right as I attempt to express this condition—I have little immunity against?
I’ve got drafts open, multiple of them. This is not how I work. Usually I am focused, starting a post and working and working in sole isolation until it is written, and only afterward, only once I am freed from its blissful confines do I find that I meander because something has grabbed me, hooked me, lured me deep beneath the ground. From within that space, I attune my ear to the moisture of the soil and hear the beat of the earth, waiting on elements that brew, threads that are conjured, the faint tendrils of abstraction. But where is the well right now? Where is the wellhead with its wooden lid and iron grate, the one I pry open to inhale the musky loam beneath?
The brain is, in its physical structure, finite, and though I don’t understand the nature of consciousness and the limitless void of experience, I know that there is a capacity and threshold that bound these concepts and that creativity, with all its whims, falls prey to that which restricts, fleeing from the mundane, from stress and excess, cowering somewhere bleak and thin. To put it another way, creativity succumbs to things outside the well. This is my lament.
The end of a long year draws near. I crave the summer that is here upon us now in Australia. I long for days sprawled out reading in the sunshine. I long for coffee dripped intravenous as I offset its stimulus with the redolent fragrance of negroni. I long to drink words, to let them digest and reform and watch them spill free from my hand and rearrange their parts in ways I could never have conceived.
I long to once again find that field. The field full of wells.
I experienced that malaise a few weeks ago, Nathan. Loads of half-started posts; ideas that didn't go anywhere; completed articles that remain unpublished because I didn't like them. (All writers are their own worse critics.) The main difference between you and me, though, is how beautifully you express it. Me? I drew solace from a blues song by Bo Carter: My Pencil Won't Write No More.😁
Well, I think this is a perfect description of the writer's world, Nathan. Nothing amiss, all normal. I question the health benefits of the coffee / negroni overload, but at least you are not stabbing yourself with a fork. You maybe might need a completely different change of scene for a week or two to reboot? Works for me. Sometimes a handy bottle of scotch on my desk while I work can be helpful.