I’m sorry, but it has to be done.

I have to write about writing.

I have avoided doing this because it’s always the take-it-to-the-meta-level copout when you can’t write anything that’s really down there on the ground and meaningful.  But it must be done.

I am in a rut.

Everything I write feels the same.

Everything I write feels stale and lifeless, like it was coughed up by a machine making greeting cards.

Everything I write comes out stilted, and I want to smash every sentence after it comes out; they say kill your children, but I don’t think they mean that.  Only a few keystrokes, fingers flowing rapidisimo over the keys, and then I’m abruptly backspacing.  Damnit.

I have the benefit or the misfortune of consulting a photographer about such issues.  And a calm, laid-back photographer at that, the meadow to my tornado.  And his response is to dismiss the old logic – the write every day write constantly write for practice advice that’s religiously dolled out in every essay and book about writing – and to say, wait it out.  Step back.  Read. Walk.  Ride in the backs of trucks, in clankety buses.  Listen to music.

But I can’t.  I feel like I’m missing something, there’s a hidden vein of precious metals coursing underneath the damn house and I’m missing it, I’m just not tapping into it somewhere.  They’re fundamentally different ways of seeing – the photographer who sees inspiration in the moment, the flash, and the preparation time as a sort of seed bed fed by water and calm and relaxation and some theory and plotting found in books, and the writer who thinks it’s gotta be constant, that yes, there’s the fertilizer of books and experience, but really, it’s not going to be a flash, it’s going to be what comes up after clawing through two pages of frustrating hideousness and hitting the vein, with black gold spurting up in your face.  Oh, you think.  I really wanted to write about Cincinnati.

It often takes the battle to get there, right.  So you can’t simply sit back and wait – you have to find your way there, you have to go swashbuckling through the stuck feeling.

Or do you?  The other night cooking pasta in the kitchen, chopping garlic and slicing the florets from the broccoli stem, we talked about writing and photography.  I was worried about not living enough.  Not observing guerrillas in Chiapas or drinking mezcal in a dusty pueblo in la Mixteca, not having these glorious adventures in the stories I’ve been reading on Glimpse about driving across Swaziland and dodging marriage proposals or playing the bagpipes in a rural Scottish pub.  Was that why I was in this block?  Because I was reaching into the scraped out depths of my own identity and coming back with nothing, with the same old stories and tone?  And Jorge said that anything – the broccoli, the cramped kitchen and our conversations, the dog and her tennis ball – could become subject matter, right?

Yes, I said, but the spark of inspiration, of something more that really gives life to a story, that’s the elusive thing.  It might be in the story of the dog chasing the tennis ball and slip-sliding all over the room on her paws, but I can’t seem to access it.

I have often found that it’s not necessarily the experience that makes the story, that provides the inspiration.  There can be great stories in an experience, getting lost in the jungles of East Africa or drinking cow’s blood or meeting the Queen of England, but the story can be muddled and stale if it doesn’t strike that place in you that needs to process something and get it out; if it doesn’t tap into something deeper and more enduring.  There are times on a 5 p.m. walk with the dog when a whole essay blooms suddenly and I have to go home and write it out, or there’s a development like Copala and an urgency overtakes me because I have to write about it.  I have to get something that’s stewing inside of me out and I feel tremendous relief once its over.

It’s that I search for – the sensation that there’s really something there that must be expressed or it will be lost, and the loss will be important; it will be the loss of something true but only half-formed, something which could have been worked into a tangible consideration that people think about when they sit down to dinner or look up for a second from opening a letter or turning a corner; something that exists and is present in the world, that tames all those half-formed thoughts and their posses of abstractions into something graspable and meaningful.

In these times when I have to write I need to get every sentence of it right, and that is a satisfying feeling.  It requires complete concentration and focus but the reward is seeing your experience mirrored and deepened on the page.

I had that with the short narrative I wrote for David Miller’s writing contest last week – one ordinary encounter on an ordinary walk that contained the truth of a certain type of experience here, and that fit the parameters of the contest perfectly.  Two narrators, two perspectives, same place and experience.  It was a tremendous relief to feel I wasn’t writing simply to write but was rather expressing, as close to the bone as possible, an experience and its truth in the world.

In the meantime, I have been doing this every morning, these writing exercises that run in circles around something I can’t get to.  Here’s one about teeth:

I was writing and then I had a sudden epiphany about teeth.

I was writing about teeth and then I revealed profound truths about life in general, in a subtle, enticing way at once unique and universal.

I was writing about teeth while drinking a cup of coffee.

I was writing about teeth while remembering a night in Italy several years ago and how I awoke from a drunken spell of complete non-feeling, only air and blackness, to feel my face bleeding to the slow creep of pain. I wailed “hopîtal, hopîtal!” in an Italian plaza to the churning of the crowds, felt the night swooning around me in fireworks and booze and laughter and sweeping movement that went so fast it seemed slow, and an eternity later, I was led by the hand to a hospital and set on a cot, where doctors came and went touching some part of my face and then leaving to drink champagne; after having slammed my African-American boyfriend up against the wall for supposedly beating me (“No, I fell!” I wept, “No, I fell!” and it made no difference), the doctors seemed satisfied and through with work for the night and I was alone when midnight came and the faint rise and fall of cheers came from the street.

I was writing about teeth while my brain raced and skipped along the dozens of other possibilities of what-I-could-be-writing while I was writing about teeth, because I hadn’t planned to write about teeth and Natalie Goldberg’s writing prompt encouraged me to do so.  A copy of “Wild Mind’ isn’t far these days, when I am searching for writing like a squirrel searching for the last acorns of the season, searching in a way that feels sparse and wanting, as if I have waited too long and missed something critical.  How much does timing matter in these things?

I was writing about teeth while the dog slept at my feet and the kitten, having forgotten what she was so caught up in, fell asleep on the arm of the big slick chair that evokes 70’s disco, swirly and vinyl.  I wonder how cats manage to do that – simply forget what they were so intently focused on and what they’d directed one hundred percent of their energies to planning on doing and instead let their eyes blink, and close, and the warmth of the room fall over them and their small bodies pulse with the rhythm of gentle breaths in sleep.

I was writing about teeth when I started to freeze up, my muscles tensing with the rebellion against writing the same old thing for the same old places.  My shoulders stiffened and my body clenched, the words coming out already stilted like the puffs of a machine that’s belching and chugging irregularly, confused, a hairball somewhere in its tubular interior.

I was writing about teeth when I felt comforted by their regularity and their irregularity; both of these qualities are essential to teeth.  They all come in two lines, their places so fixed that dentists give them numbers.  “Cavity in number D82.”  I know this because I have had lots of teeth issues.  My favorite dentist in Oaxaca used to pretend to be the tooth, acting out whatever was wrong with him/it.  I saw him once at the movies and he pretended not to notice me – I think I made him nervous.  He had gray hair and was a born dad, with the timeless dad qualities of goofiness and kindness and a protective, comforting air.  But I still made him nervous, maybe because my mouth came with so many traumas.  My teeth are highly irregular in that way – they’ve been bashed into plazas and drilled and braced and chipped and broken and they’ve had canals dug into them.  But still, they have their numbers and their names that any dentist, on 5^th Avenue in Columbus Ohio with Sunny 95 playing in the background (Sun-NY NineTY-FIVE!  Jingle jingle – “and Iiiiiiiiii will alwayyyyyyys loooooveeeee youuuuuuuuuuu”) or in a stark office on a periphery road in Aix-en-Provence under the shadow of a beautiful olive-skinned doctor with deliciously clean-shaven skin and a pleasant smell of mint and lavender who made me nervous every time he leaned over me to do some work on my mouth, or in Oaxaca with the goofy dad-like teeth impersonator, my teeth have their numbers and their names so that they can be identified.  There is something comforting in this, and perhaps a lesson to extrapolate from it about humanity.  There is a baseline sameness, regularity, behind all the jagged edges and dents and ridges and jumbles and gaps?

I was writing about teeth when I started to feel better, to take the morning into account and the fact that it was Friday and the soft light of the sun getting stronger was pressing against my curtains.  I started to hear the high-pitched flutes of the birds’ chatter, the strong throb of cicadas that’s taken over Oaxaca in the past few days and that reminds me so vividly of summer in Ohio (sprinklers, the smell of pools and wet sidewalks); I felt the morning rising and emerging, my favorite part of the day.

There is always life – life is always there – even when you can’t write.  The morning still grows up and then turns into the flat and long afternoon with its annihilating light, and later soars to the brilliant gold-blues of evening while we settle down to read or gather with micheladas around the soccer game in the bar, and finally the light hunkers down again into night, and again tomorrow morning emerges pale and chilly.  So I’m not writing about teeth anymore, I’m writing about writing.  And maybe getting closer, closer, to what I want to say.

This is when I circled around to arrive at the reluctant conclusion I came to above – I’m going to write about writing.  I am still, after two years of doing this full-time, figuring it out.  I can hear the chorus of resounding laughter from writer ancestors lounging in tunics in the clouds; yes, yes, I know it’s probably something you never “get,” you never “know” completely and that’s why you keep doing it, you idiot.  Because you can never totally tame and master it any more than you can tame and master that rising and peaking and falling day.  So you just keep going through those moments both when it’s flowing out of you in a rush and you can’t type fast enough to keep up with it and those moments when it’s heaving dry coughs and sputtering and limping along, about to pass out from lifelessness at any moment.  You keep going and feeling it out.  Writing is a life (I hate the word “career” – it evokes 6^th grade career fairs when nice men and women in suits from Marshall Fields handed out glossy packets about corporate office parks and agricultural engineering and dentistry) that involves feeling, and constantly being aware of feeling, and I have come to think that is why I chose it.  It is the cleansing exit ramp for all that excess feeling I have for the world.  But it also becomes so intensely personal, and navigating its needs – for writing, I believe, has its own needs, its own interior compass where it directs its energies – can be exhausting, and can draw up that taunting question – “Is it me, or is it you?”

Writing, perhaps it is both of us.  There is my hope of this natural divine inspiration that will shoot up like a geyser in front of me, and I’ll sit down and start flying over the ol’ keyboard I mastered (90 wpm!) in 4th grade with Mavis Beacon Teaching Typing, and then there’s the awareness that you’re always there, writing, and I have to get around to you even if the geyser isn’t terrifying and stupefying and slamming me into a rush of prose.  So I go on hoping that even on those mornings when it doesn’t come and I’m pounding on about teeth something will come up, the faint scent of a trail, and I will sniff my way along it until I reach a nest in the woods with a couple of warm eggs in it and finally I’ll just be writing without the constant nagging voices and uncertainty and hinging around dead-end sentences; I’ll be writing in that one illuminated spot in the woods with the warm eggs in the nest and that will be where I’ve wanted to end up, all along.