Mute

I don't think I've spoken more than five words in over 16 hours.

I can already tell I'm going to have issues with this blog, I can't format my text the way I want to. This is not conducive to creative writing.

Strange thing about not speaking: I dwell inside my head, and feel the spiral closing ever inward, as thoughts get piled on top of other thoughts and are disseminated and dissected and lead to other smaller thoughts; thoughts within thoughts, thinking about the future and my writing and what I want to say but never having a way to say it. Not worried so much about writing, but rather worried about not writing. If I don't write, I cannot speak.

I ponder the essence of talent and its limitations. Are talents within the arts inherently finite, or are they cultivated and grown? I'd like to think I can cultivate and expand my talents, eventually reaching some grand virtuosic level, some kind of God of the written word, but I find myself more often thinking that I have or soon will reach a plateau, and remain there, never progressing, never moving forward. Perhaps it is something you are born with, and it is a set amount, like the number of brain cells or chromosomes.

Surely, proficiency in mechanics and grammar can be honed and fine-tuned, reaching a level of near-perfection, but I do not believe this applies to vocabulary, thoughts, themes; or, more abstractly, the ability to convey a particular idea/plot/character in the most effective way. Perhaps, with prolonged use, I can use this blog to chart noticeable progress over time.

The longer I spend not speaking out loud, the further my brain begins to spin out of control, fractal thought patterns flowing out with the tide, then crashing back down over themselves in waves. It becomes such that I start to feel myself slipping away from myself, like a silhouette or a shadow, existing outside of time and space and the real as it is typically perceived. I cannot describe these thoughts to you. I do not even know what they are, or their meaning, all I know is how they feel: like a threaded rabbit hole, one that may or may not have a bottom to it, my reluctance to trace their paths as they wind down manifesting as, in simplest terms, a literal fear of going insane.

I attended a book reading on campus last night hosted by Blake Butler, with a guest speaker (who was a graduate student in the MFA program at New Mexico State University). Blake's prose both surprised and frightened me, his reading style more of an angry shouting at the audience, sometimes tumbling over himself and backtracking, me only catching every third or fourth word in the cacophony. I was suddenly struck by a sense that this is where I belong. "This is what I should be doing! I need to be writing, reading, speaking, attending other readings, meeting writers, talking to writers, about writing. This should be my life." What was more surprising wasn't the reading itself (and it was, indeed, quite bizarre [I wanted to buy some of his books afterwards, but I had no cash]), but the realization afterwards, while talking to my creative writing teacher (who invited me to the event with the lure of extra credit), that societies like this can and do exist: talented people who know other talented people, and meet with them, and discuss their talents. It was amazing. Writers, I began to think, do not simply have to be celebrities, as I had always envisioned them, but could in fact be approachable. The same way my glimmers of complex weaving thought patterns materialize at night, in my sleep, in my silence; so do these writers have their own complex web of communications and contacts: networking, reading, travelling, and, most importantly, writing. My creative writing teacher knew the man speaking, had met him personally, who had a book published that was reviewed by the New York Times, the review itself also written by a man who my teacher knew, and had met, who has also published books, my teacher also revealing in an aside comment that the man who sponsored and established the readings program at NMSU was a good friend of David Foster Wallace, and that he (the teacher) had actually met DFW as well, had picked him up from the airport once when he (DFW) had traveled to NMSU to give a reading as well, prior to his suicide. My teacher asked him about writing Infinite Jest. "How did you do it?" Allegedly, Dave Wallace's response was simply "A lot of ritalin."

My brain spun and careened out, bounced off itself, and I realized I was out of my depth. I could not communicate with these people, I did not even know them. They were writers, real writers. And I was a peon, a serf in their midst. I fled.