this bewailing cry

Phone rings, somebody on the other end wants to know when I'm coming to visit them. 

I'm so distracted I mutter, “Haven’t been myself lately…”

 

“Hmm?  What did you say?”

 

“Nothing,” I say, wiping sweat from my brow.

 

The caller waits for me to say something else, but I don't, which makes the caller very uncomfortable, and they break the silence by saying, “Still working through some things, are you…?”

 

“Always,” I say.

 

Another pause and another numb feeling.

 

“Sounds like I got you at a bad time,” the caller says, and I confirm this by intoning, “Mmmm…” 

 

“Well, let me let you go… I'll talk to you later…”

 

The caller hangs up, but I keep the receiver to my ear until the busy signal stops and I'm transferred to a recorded message that says, “If you’d like to make a call, please hang up and try again. If you need help, hang up and then dial your operator.”

 

I need help, I think, but not from you.

 

Then I remembered something a friend whispered to me the previous week.

 

“You’re starting to like your solitude a little too much…”

 

“What do you mean,” I say.

 

“Time to venture out,” says my friend, pointing to my head. “And become a living, moving thing again.”

 

A fleeting moment passes and that phrase, “living, moving thing,” is swiftly distributed across both hemispheres of my brain, and although on the surface it sounds a bit naive and corny, it gets at the truth of something and goes directly to the core of my psyche, deeply affecting me.

 

She’s absolutely right, I think.

 

My life has become a quick moving river and I'm just trying to stay afloat and not hit a boulder… I’m a bit angry with my life, myself. Always verging on being sorry for myself. Doing things for all the wrong reasons.I need to restore to me something that was very important to me when I was a kid.  Something I’ve lost…or lost sight of or the grasp of.

 

I need to find a form for my experience, but I’m sure what to write about.

 

For years I've bisected the Psyche of the Man with the Fierce Moral Sensibility Who Can’t Make Any Peace with the World and covered my canvases with the long, emotional colors of all those Lost People Who Find Themselves by Recognizing Their Love for One Another… but I’ve never been able to find the precise rising line of conflict and resolution to those themes.

 

Maybe because I've compromised my form and am no longer capable of serious introspection.

 

I’ve become another 21st-Century Working Class Writer Trying to Come to Grips with the Reality of My Own Life;  too exhausted to develop anything more than the calluses on my finger tips from all that angsty typing.

 

“Getting stuck is what makes us not move,” says my friend. “You’ve got to move into a different place and find what it is you want to write about.”

 

I pause,  then somewhat self-mockingly say, “I used to want to write about how we all have to work to find the best in ourselves and others.How there should be less suffering and more humanity, liberty, equality and peaceful coexistence… but that’s just a very pleasant fiction… there’s no way to follow that tale to its end… you can never solve the moment when you write about things like that.”

 

Sighing with sentiment, my friend says, “Your fantasies have lapsed into frustration.”

 

That's when I began to wonder just how far down this brown-eyed troubadour can go.

Reviews

[Philip Gaber]

To continue. When I finally found the courage to show my work, I was praised for it, by family members, teachers and friends. That's when my ego kicked in. Your points are understandable and valid. The same can be said of comedians and actors. We want to be told the same story again and again. Look at children. They want us to read Green Eggs and Ham ad nauseum. I hope that was sufficient.

[Philip Gaber]

MSB
Ego is a significant part of it. Comparison another. Is there anyone out there like me? It’s complicated. I started writing because I the youngest of 4 and I didn't have the confidence to verbally express myself. I had a lot of thoughts, experiences, questions that I wasn't comfortable sharing with my family so I found an old manual typewriter in the attic and decided that was the best way to convey those thoughts. I don't know.Just my take. Thanks man for offering your thoughts. Peace and love.

[Michael Sun Bear]

Philip you know I am a fan so please do not take anything I am about to say as criticism of your work. I am actually soliciting your thoughts because I respect your work. I find myself more and more wondering why any of us write at all. It has all been said before, over and over and over. As the decades, then the centuries pass, it seems we are all trying to write the same old truths, but doing it with less beauty, less insight, with increasing mediocrity. I was so startled the first time I read an ancient Greek play. The writing was brilliant. We worship the writing of Shakespeare, after all, who of us can write with such brilliance. Yet was he not simply trying to entertain while putting bread on the table? Did he have the same thoughts and feelings about writing that I am expressing? Are we on a never ending downward spiral, our society tolerating, even rewarding ever increasing mediocrity, requiring our youth be unable to read and comprehend, be unable to think clearly, write clearly. I love this community here on WritersCafe, but I often feel by contributing I am just feeding my own ego. I guess this really isn’t the forum for such discussion, but hey, if anyone here and there in reviews would care to share their own thoughts, please do.