...The Denuding Pen...

I know the garbage is in these genes, my genes.

Garbage? That’s euphemism, still.

As I write this, the counterarguments of moralists drum in my ears, “How can you be so ungrateful to the Creator, for this, umm, umm… talent…?”

They call the paroxysm (or, should I say pathology) of the chaffing pen in hand a “talent”. I don’t blame them. If you can merge colors into shapes on a canvas, you are known as an artist and you live in your own world of idiosyncrasies with this talent of yours. Along the same scale, if you can string a few adjectives in an original way, coupled with an original idea here or there, your talent is writing. And there are myriads then, a writer, reporter, poet, and further branches up that tree...

I ask myself why I assume such an ambivalent tone, if not entirely a negative one, about writing? Why do I refer to this genetic component of mine as garbage, when I have contentedly accepted the more harmful elements of heredity as comfortably-my-own? Why is it not a compliment, anymore, to hear someone say, ‘Ah, but you were born with a silver pen in hand?’

They say alcohol is illegal not because of what its chemical content per se, but because it alters human consciousness.

And so, there is no wickedness in the pen itself, but its effect on one’s consciousness needs a little pondering. Pen of a scholar (and that’s a tricky term to define nowadays) will perpetually yield a different sort of serum from the pen of a fiction-monger or an opinionated blabber.


Worse yet, the pen reveals everything, in spite of you.

Three sentences composed and the human mind lies flat on paper, for everyone to look at and deal with in their own individual way. Many enjoy that exhibitionism perhaps (and I apologize, not too sincerely though, for the loaded meaning of that word) but worshippers of Silence, seekers of grace in reticence… remain in terminal claustrophobia with words flying in the cosmos, on paper. It is as if the nothing in world seems to exist in silence anymore, every meaningless, meaningful joy, act of love and pain MUST be rendered in words … to paradoxically loose its meaning.

And the counterargument of the philologist (linguist) inside me comes out, “But words came into being to communicate. You are too limited to communicate otherwise…philosophers and historians of all dusty ages communicate with us even today, because they left words behind them, for us…”

And the pious rises at this moment too, “And how can you forget? Your Creator corresponded with you in words…”


Did He?

I ask again, did my Creator communicate with words? Does anyone have an answer to that? Weren’t all divine scriptures revealed as inspirations first, and translated into scriptures by the prophets, saints?

Time for the poet now, to shower her emotional gibberish, “When your limbs are wounded, they bleed with blood… when the heart is wounded, how else would it bleed, but with words…”


…

How to argue with them…
When these voices are a part of me, not extrageneous…?

And when, even with the aspiration to join the amorphous worshippers of Silence up in the Alps, the genetic endowment kick chemicals every now and then to pick up that pen – I can’t keep the vigil of silence up for long.

Write, I must.
Begrudgingly.

Ugh! What a waste of cyber space - - -

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