I’ve read quite a bit of Mishima in my time. His autobiographical Sun and Steel being my most frequented. Since the many re-readings of the man’s personal testament, I’ve found myself transfixed by the idea of his frustration with language itself.
For some time, after coming into contact with this rose, I’ve walked around with a tiny thorn in the back of my head. Tickling, prodding, disturbing me, but somehow it eludes my hands when I go to pluck it’s prickle. When I turn on my back to sleep it is jabbed through my pillow and I can’t rest. Like many truths, tiny thorns have quite an ability to cause personal disturbance.
The problem of writing, especially in fiction, is its obsessive compulsion with ensnaring existence and creating for the writer a hideous lens from which to view life. “Could this be a story?”, “I have to go home and put this on paper.”, and my most hated, overstated sinew that sews eyes shut, “I have writer’s bl*ck.”
The act of writing itself is in many ways so outside of reality that it is almost pathetic. It feels masturbatory. I’ve always felt as though God punishes any shame that begins at the tip of a pen and ends on a piece of paper. And we’ve all had “writer’s bl*ck”, but I principally refuse to address it in name. Or I would be collapsing under the idea that my mind is spearheading a conspiracy against my body, succeeding in a coup who’s end goal is to hide a writing corpse.
The admission of writing itself is already self-indulgent. There is nothing more hideous to me than letting my body rot at the receiving end of stillborn thoughts. I would rather be sitting there tugging on my dick like a maniac, so I can actually waste time with something intentional. I’d rather indulge in a series of sick spasms that lead to thin air, than glare at an empty page.
In fact my advice to writers with “writer’s bl*ck” - (for which I’m sure there’s proven psychological experiments fueled by PhD student abuse) - is to just push through it. I’ll take the flat-Earther/anti-vaxxxer approach here, to summate the thesis of this blog-post.
I don’t care.
This feeling is getting in the way of me doing whatever I want. I’ll sit there and write 462 words of gobbledegook before I admit defeat to the concept.
The frustration with words which Mishima professes, in his case, is to a long life of 45 years spent in nights attempting to describe life, instead of living it. But here I am, finding myself crawling back my master like a beaten dog, begging my laptop to give birth to my puppies.
This happened to my buddy Eric