triumph appears, dripping from the lobes of my brain. Words, beautiful words, are made to haunt the page—made to do so by me through feats of black magic that seem as mysterious to myself in restrospect as they so obviously seem to others.
I don’t understand how it works at all.
—
Then, there are the temporal deserts, the vast expanses of time space in which nothing in particular is seen, heard, or felt to come forth from tangle of prickly notions that sift endlessly through the densely smoky atmosphere of my mind.
Inevitably and often not at too desperate a length, I begin to suspect that the well has run dry, or that if it hasn’t happened to have run dry at this moment, it certainly will do so eventually as a matter of fate or even simple bookkeeping.
Then, most often surprisingly, the cycle beings again anew.
—
There are obvious questions to be asked here.
1. Will the end eventually come? Will some idea be the “last idea,” some phrase be the “last phrase?”
2. What, precisely and in the meantime, are the enabling circumstances for such production? Invariably from the apex of each peak I “discover” through supposed self-observation a new set of necessary factors, a new environmental and habitual checklist, a catalogue of superstition by which to forcefully bear my next work of value… but in each case, of course, these turn out to be mirages at best, comical acts of idiocy at worst.
3. To what extent is it prudent to rely on this regime of unpredictable productivity for a career of any kind? Might it not be wiser to grow potatoes or to inject rivets, occupations whose career trajectories tend not to be subject to the ebb and flow of epiphenomenal factors and phantastic forces?
4. What the hell is with the God damn writers’ block most of the time?