I Write Because I'm Guilty

I write because I’m guilty.

Some may be deterred from reading onwards because they see the ‘I’m’ and assume a certain kind of informality, perhaps a childishness. Some may read on because they see ‘guilty’ and assume sex and drugs and late nights of self-selling indulgence. Both are appropriate I feel.

And I feel through finding I write. It really is an appropriate expression of what I happens; suddenly I will notice I have written thousands of words, eaten into whole evenings with cold vegetables and aching fingers – typing, typing, typing.

I think ‘finding yourself writing’ though, is extremely difficult – almost like my indulgent kind of self-destruction. I hardly go through the process of writing ideas on paper anymore; perhaps because I don’t think I have any. Or perhaps because the physical manifestation on paper seems almost sluggish.  Instead, I feel awfully unworthy, turning over, mulling through, picking at words and phrases like the ultimate recycling. Everything I have read suddenly becomes a kind of carrion. In the saturation of the media age I wonder how many people have what could be considered ‘fresh words’ ‘fresh thoughts’. Often I marvel over Thomas Hardy and how at the turn of the Twentieth Century, he not only expressed a kind of lament but also coined a number of words. Perhaps worming a way into my language of my own is the only way to retain any kind of value – like a parasite riving through the rot.

However, the academically-esteemed method of value is often through ‘further reading’. Could woman or man make a masterpiece if she/he had the full ability of the English language yet had been raised on a diet of shopping brochures , road signs and a dictionary? A difficult drag of the tongue after life expressed in italics in the exp. Column: ‘ Question (noun.). The young woman asked the doctor a question’.

 What about myself – a  flurry of the Bronte’s, D.H Lawrence, half-read texts,  late nights pouring over incredibly  sensational paragraphs but not knowing of the  person who wrote them. Does this make me a bad ‘reader’? Does it make me ‘bad’ that I never finished Middlemarch but read the same paragraphs The Sea, The Sea three times  over drinking coffee so acrid it made my mouth twitch – like the formation of appropriate expression. When I sit and read the guilt thickens over my fingers like a stain, telling me of waste, of waste.

For that is perhaps a rashness of statement which has rotted down into uncertainty –  is it better to consume or produce? In reading the writing of others I may be moved internally. In writing things own I am moved, even externally.  There is so much waste here – time on one side, paper, energy, life, on the other. My guilt for this is all over everything, and  I fight myself at night.

Will it make me a bad writer?’ I wonder if people would rather be bad readers or bad writers. I guess that reading is typically an expected skill, whereas writing seems to assume  some superiority – debatably. The debate is chaired, today, tomorrow, day after bloody day, by guilt – the sharp wiry umpire-like figure who unfurls through the corner of the gut.

Guilty because the time spent not writing could constitute that of ‘wasted’. Guilty because the time in which I write is so often deemed anti-social, ‘wasted’ in the words of my family. I wonder whether I write to try and  offer a way to understand or to hide myself further. I cannot deal with questions and do not offer answers.

Do I talk about it to other people? If other people are passionate about your passion they become competitive. If they are not, they often regard it  with  a kind of hostility. We operate on an exchange of fears but perhaps this is too much. It is difficult to become attached to anything,  in light of this fear. That is why I am so attempted to detach – into tabloid television, even the safety of closing eyes and curling up. It is non-destructive, but also ‘lazy’. See where language gets me? Yet my hands still return to writing, like they are desperate to leave something other than blood and bone.

Language gets me nowhere, except guilt. I want so often to tell a person in the street that they are beautiful – beautiful has a meaning for me and a wholly different meaning for them and I would be glad we shared that realisation. That would mean something.  Shared realisation rather than shared experience,  finally something fucking recognised.  It would also mean, most probably, a series of stares and be seen as unacceptable.

Still, My grandparents still attempt to search my face for something they  can acceptably ‘see’ – for   writing too is the persual of the selfish, whereas as the social puppet seeing others is  the ‘expected’.  I am a brilliant liar. As part of that I am learning to perfect that equilibrium of ‘being there’ for my family without being wholly physically present, so giving ‘space’ too.  It leaves bruises.

I break conventions through writing and writing breaks me.

Because there is a difference between writing and recycling. A difference I have attempted  through breaking the skin, eating until  I’m sick, feeling the blood on the back of my head and feeling utterly empty. Then writing.  I write because I am terrified that I will instead be misrepresented by my own fickle voice, that I will die and will have only left money, belongings; nothing of difference. For I am guilty of  envying those visual artists –the opportunity to express something which has never been seen before. Words are my lovers, but also my fetter. It would be difficult to express if I love them, for haven’t they already been lovers with everyone else, in some sense?

Instead I use them to turn flesh.

I write because I’m guilty.