February 19, 2009

Nowhere. Now here.

This has got to be one of the worst days in a long while.

Sandra told me my heart is missing. She meant to say that I was emotionally disconnected from the music, but her words hit the bulls-eye in every possible way.

My muse is gone. I can't write anymore. I don't feel pleasure in playing the piano or singing. All I feel is emptiness. I pass through each day doing the gestures, getting nowhere.

No. Not nowhere. How did I get here? What happened to my discipline, my work ethic? I look at what I have done these last few years, and I think, "I could have tried harder, practiced more, stopped slacking off." I used to play 2.5 hours of tennis, 2 hours of piano every day; I used to be able to wear tight-fit shirts without being self-conscious of my body fat; I used to finish my homework first before spending time on the computer. Now I am fat, out of shape, lazy, unmotivated.

My mother is not particularly supportive of my writing. When she commented on Sunday that I should not be wasting so much time writing when there are so many other things I have been putting off, I immediately reacted with a defensive snarl. But I get it now. My writing is juvenile, a method of fulfilling the fantasies I want to live through. At school, we study works in which every word, every description, every moment in the story conveys a deeper meaning. I cannot even contemplate how rigorously the great writers toiled in creating their masterpieces.

I used to write only vignettes and poems on this blog. But now that I have broken off ties with my muse, I am dry and uninspired. I do not know how soon I will be able to finish the current short story I am working on, but this is the central question I want to explore next:

Would you kill yourself slowly for the sake of art?


2 comments:

Ari said...

perhaps.

Anonymous said...

i would slowly die for the sake of art. i don't believe in growing old anyway, as my habits and psychology don't seem geared towards a life of longevity.

but honestly, don't you think those great writers might have once thought like you? i don't think any of the greatest writers were especially wealthy or gregarious people. They probably died cursing the world for its stolid rejection of their art. just so fifty years later the english professors of the world could proclaim it great, and high school students could stay up till the butt crack of dawn writing down line after line of bullshit about it. But they sat down and obsessed over every little nuance of prose and diction possible. They did it anyway.

"there's no business like show business. but there's a million like accounting"- Jay Leno