confessions

All authors will tell you that to write, one must know solitude. Marguerite Duras has written an entire book on the subject. She speaks of a house where she was isolated, though in her Duras way she claims that solitude was with her even when she went out for a drink at the nearby pub or had guests over for supper. She speaks of solitude as a state of being, as a veil that covers and permeates. With others, she is always alone with her book. Yet she needs the house where her solitude may take form, where it weaves into the veil she then carries with her outside and in the presence of others.

I once read in a magazine interview that Yann Martel wrote Life of Pi over a span of fours years, some days writing pages it of it and others just a few lines. He, too, spoke of the solitude of the author, yet he mentioned how difficult a forced solitude can be for the one who writes. He spoke of the dual existence: the one with people, to know them and observe them, and the one alone, to write down the outside.

Authors also say that to be an author, one must write. And write. And simply write. Lucia Etxebarria writes always, or so it seems. She has worked as scriptwriter, a journalist, and a writer of essays, short stories and novels. I’ve only ever read her novel Amour, prozac et autres curiosités. It’s beautiful. She wrote on her website that authors write.

I have always saved myself from the conceit of calling myself an author by stating that I don’t write, not always. And I don’t always enjoy it. Writing is often hard because words are part of a faulty system, because rereading myself is seldom as I had planned it and because I become intimidated by the last piece I wrote if I should happen to like it. Writing can be an extremely distressing process. And it can reveal so much, even if the reader doesn’t realize how much of me he or she is reading. But at other times how little. And the best way to hide yourself behind your writing is by writing what pretends not to be you, like an thesis or some other school related paper, or like a blog entry about the books you read, or like something historical, empirical, and whatever else that evades popular conceptions of auto-fiction, or auto-non-fiction.

I have always been one to enjoy my solitude. Social and talkative as I may be, I have always relished my time to myself, looked forward to it and savoured it. But these days my solitude has been playing a nasty trick on me. It has turned on me. It is counter-productive. Days at home stretch out into weeks. I become domestic, as a means of procrastination. As my days lose their purpose, so does much else in my life, or at least my perspective of it. And at times, when all the laundry is done and the cat hairs discarded, at times I can’t fight it anymore. Solitude leaves me and I become lonely, and alone. And I wait for the hours to pass so that something might happen, something outside of me that might help propel me back into some kind of active state. I wait, lying on my bed, watching my ceiling. Books gather in piles, their words too heavy to read. My blog is not updated because I feel no use or purpose of putting thoughts into words, and can scarcely assemble my thoughts anyway. All will to work, to be productive in the most remote way, leaves me. I become desperate of a desperation that can barely express itself, so lethargic it is.

Claire and I were to have a writing exchange. I had some ideas. What more, I had some resolution. But days pass and I don’t even know how to start, where to write, by what medium, how to assemble, what won’t get on my nerves as the mere thought of it already does. I don’t even know under what title to save it, or in which file. It is complete formlessness, matching itself to me and my lack of motivation, and my resulting frustration.

On good days I realize it’s because I have “nothing going for myself.” Most people tell me to take advantage of this time and to relax. I can’t seem to do that, and inertia seems to deaden me all over. Stupid horrible state. And to think one day I'll look back on these days and will surely envy them.