I’m not going to write a title, because I don’t want to be restricted. That’s ok, right? I mean, should I write a title? Will my words be lost without one? Nah, maybe they’ll be fine. I take a deep breath and stare at the blank page—just write—I remind myself, the words will come...
And so they do. I don’t choose all of them, sometimes they choose me. I look at them and give them their one decisive factor in life: whether they make the page or not. They cycle through this massive line of words, each waiting in anticipation, hoping that this is their one chance, that today is their day, that this page is their new home. Hmmmm...next! And “buffoonery” quietly proceeds to the back of the line. The words come to me and I just paste them on the page. I’m just the zookeeper, watching the crazy animals run the show. Most of the time its amusing, other times its not. Sometimes they change into floating streams of water and silk braids, glistening under a dark set moonlight. The web of water and silk comes together into a frozen vortex; a shy tornado of blue diamonds. And sometimes, it’s all blue. Every word falls back to blue and all I can see is blue. Sometimes, I can’t see anything at all, and I have to close my eyes and pretend, pretend that I can. Some days, it’s so tough, I look at the crowd gathered in my head, and stare in amazement. This? This is the best you can do? I shake my head and return to my dimly lit bedroom. I don’t know. Honestly, most of the time, I just stare at a blank page. I prod an unopened cardboard box...nothing. Writing is so ambiguous and so random and so paradoxical, that it is like trying to grasp a feather in flight, one that slips and glides with the wind when you think that you’ve finally gotten it in your grasp; it’s like trying to be a bear. You look at the stream flowing downhill into the meadows and there they are, hundreds of them, fish of every color and shape, and you gently tip toe forward, you, with your big hairy feet and bear-ish toes, you wait until the right moment, there it is a bright orange striped fish, and you lunge head first like a dog into the water. Upon impact you realize, you no longer are a bear or even a dog, you’re a minnow, a minnow trying to eat a fish, and you’re trying to swim upstream. The thunderous noise of the water, the calamity of rocks and mad fish are all flowing with the violent current and this stream is now a river rapid, and you can’t even see, the water is so blinding that you get swept up in the furious crash of the waves and you can’t do it any longer; the biting waves sweep you away into the sea. Sometimes, that is how it feels to write, to try to grasp an idea that’s swimming around in your head. It can get scary so fast, but then you just have to remember: it’s ok, I’m only going to test the waters; if it feels good, then I’ll go in for a dip.
Writing is as much a tool for the living as it is a tool of the dead. Stories, histories, past events, that one time grandma came over and set the kitchen on fire, the day your goldfish died, old friends with long sherbert hair, and days that smelled of cribs and diapers, and deceased relatives, and friends who’ve moved away, and mysterious cats in the night; and all these things are as much alive as they are dead. The cat that crept in the shadows was hit by a eighteen-wheeler later that week, but it still exists as a cat of the darkness in you. Sitting by the fireplace at your family’s Christmas party with bodies awkwardly scattered throughout the house; that feeling of safety and security, that comfort of family, it still exists somewhere inside you. Inside your heart, perhaps. And writing is the excavator’s brush which grabs the dying flame in us all, the flame, smothered by words and time, which holds us together, the passion which is us. Life and the reason for living. That is the journal upon which writing’s fountain pen may write. It is the exercise that grants us truth. It is the delicate dance of reality. As Ray Bradbury puts it, “...writing is survival...You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you” (xii - xiii).
These random strokes of an ink cartridge form symbols, and these symbols form even more elaborate symbols that emerge out of the paper as colorful pictures and thoughts. Hieroglyphic blocks of awkward symbols emerge—they emerge! How beautiful this emergence is, and in the process they transcend the lines of chicken-scratch that they are. And they make us laugh, and they make us cry, and they make us ponder, and they make us think. This emergence of thought: a wild horse beating its long, powerful, black tail; it leaps out of the page, snorting through its big black nostrils; front legs tucked, its beady eyes swim around frantically as it enters our world, its big, powerful, sleek black body follows; its muscles, extravagant; its presence, awing. Writing is not a formula—
No! It is not! Writing isn’t fill in the blanks. You don’t turn the crank on a magical essay box and violá: writing. Writing is ugliness. It’s being crude and sass. Its uniform freedom and expression. It is intention and ambiguity. To write means to try. To fail and get better. To experiment. To speak and speak whatever your heart may desire. Writing is a process of self-discovery. It is truth, in all its forms. There is no facade on these words. Writing is no doubt, one of the most open, personal, and sentimental means of communication that exists today (Pirie, 1997, 76). Well known American writer, Joyce Carol Oates, puts it this way, “I've never thought of writing as the mere arrangement of words on the page but as the attempted embodiment of a vision: a complex of emotions, raw experience.”
Where else can someone visit the past? Where too can bunnies fly and pigs speak? Show me also where one can proudly proclaim, I really don’t know what I’m doing, and not be fired! Furthermore, where else is someone accomplished in trying? In a world of perfection, writing offers an alternative. A cultivated stream, that recognizes the beauty of imperfections, that sees past the mainstream and the brain-drained social scene. It offers a lush valley of green meadows—of meadows of thinkers, and doers, and triers. It is a vacant land, where the turtle surely does beat the hare. Where rest is plentiful. A land where you may sit down to think and not be persecuted by the ‘faster, faster, faster’, blitz-paced society. A land where dreaming is reality, and to think otherwise would be foolish (Bradbury, 1990, 46).

“What if the man could see Beauty Itself; pure, unalloyed, stripped of mortality and all its pollution, stains, and vanities, unchanging, divine, the man becoming, in that communion, the friend of God, himself immortal;... would that be a life to disregard?” —Plato (Dillard, 1989, 23)

I ask you, what beauty exists that isn’t more wondrous and real than writing? It is too often, that we search for what we already have...and it is our word. Our truth. Our story. Writing and literature is the unending hymn of the universe. It is life, with its squabbles, and its ups and downs, and its smiles and frowns, on paper. There is no more true form, than that which is the product of a paper and pen. Shhhhh. Can you hear it? The lost laughter of our childhood. The worrisome fear of tomorrow and the future. The convolution of being. Life and its trivialities. A freckled face. A chocolate truffle. Writing.

By: S. Roff