* Ending the Intellectual Moratorium *



***

The idea has been trotting in my mind for quite some time now, however I remain unsure whether it's fear of failure or the absence of a creative drive that has disabled me from following the advice of "the little voice in my head": to write.

It's been a while since I last laid black ink on white paper, literally and virtually.

But there was a time, and this time is not as far off as it may seem although it definitely has felt like decades ago for me, when not a single day would pass that I wouldn't succumb to the vital need of writing. And writing was the only thing I knew, a haven where assembling words into coherent meaning and metaphor was the sole source of security.

But why then, did I stop? One might ask.

Answering this crucial question would reveal far too much of myself and would necessitate the patience to read through a long story that has begun two years ago.

A story I might not be ready to write. Since writing transfigures reality into illusion and morphs illusions into realms that may be modeled by our mind like clay, allowing imagination to wander into these realms is a dangerous dwelling if you are unprepared to unleash hidden passions and motives and unprepared to face what the story might reveal.

It is true though, that after this long moratorium I am afraid of failing at the one thing that has kept me alive, kept my intellect sharp and my soul bright - because if failure there would be, it is one from which there is no recovery, one that entails the loss of a part of myself, and such a loss cannot be sustained.

***

Comments

Anonymous said…
But reality itself is a sort of writing, a sort of illusion, a sort of construction which can never be completely pinned down and revealed—and, if it were not so, writing itself would not be possible at all, for it is the process of writing, this beholding of oneself and of 'reality' from a privileged distance that enables us to multiply and enrich our perspectives on reality and hence, ultimately, on ourselves, becoming ever richer and multifarious.

We need to live our questions deep enough so that, one day, we could live them as answers and have them like rivers outflowing from our palms. In our moments of silence and even of muteness the river, though no longer visible, does not dry up; it flows deeper, churning through unseen and unknown depths. One day it will resurface and what its waters would carry no one can know.

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