Apologies for my month-long absence. No, I wasn’t vacationing in Cap Ferrat. I was home, fighting an occupational hazard, Writer’s Block. Yep, in the middle of chapter three of my latest book (it will be my ninth) I hit the wall…a barrier that blocks the words from reaching the mind and freezes the fingers.
I think I’m slowly emerging from it now. No longer a drinker, I couldn’t seek my solution of old, alcohol, so I went to my backup—reading poetry aloud to myself to break-up the word jam. And I ran across an old favorite that did the trick—relevant excerpts from T. S. Eliot’s Quartets, the best venting I’ve read of the downside of a writer’s life. Here it is:
Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still...
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres—
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no long has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again; and now, under conditions
That seen propitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business...
Those sober and deflating words from T. S. Eliot, one of the greatest poets and wordsmiths of the Twentieth Century, do have a healing effect on us scribblers. And they goad us to press on in our compulsion demanded by our DNA…or something.