Morse Code to Nowhere
You’ll have to bear with me, just a little.
You see…it’s been a long time since I’ve written. And when the words flood you again, well...
It’s down deep in your belly. Down where the pains come, every month. I always imagine it just like a deep black sea of the void, lapping gently at the edges; it must be mounted on internal gyroscopes, I think. Because whether I sit or lie or dance or sing or fall, it always stays the same. No disturbance, always so urbanely smooth. Until, of course, it storms inside my head, and then it miraculously transfers to my brain, and pushes at the inside of my skull til I can feel the little jabs. Physical i-want-out’s, trapped inside my head, the precursor to the flood. But elsewise, it just sits there, lapping, lapping at the edges of stone, and I live around it. Live, die, sorrow, celebrate, dance, jump, fall.
I wonder if it would show up on an x-ray? A falling me, hanging brokenly on the air, while I spun helplessly around this black void inside me. Snapshot of a moment. A freeze-frame in time.
What a picture that would make for the critics to crowd around with their glasses of champagne. Artist, 16, At One With The Void. Medium: portions of the electromagnetic spectrum, transparent plastic, black and white. Dedicated to the room a woman must always have.
Artist, 16, At One With The Void.
At One with it? What are you talking about?
The only time I’m at one with it is when it floods with words. Literally, a flood. Fragments of letters, they toss and sway and crash against the stone until it gives way, and then it floods my body. And all I can do is write. Let the words overflow while my fingers itch and my knuckles spasm slowly in a hunger for the keyboard. A pen. The trance of language where all one can do is helplessly vomit up the words onto the page like you’ve been fed an emetic. They pour out of you like black tea from a tilted teapot, and spread on to the page. But no one can right this teapot, until the burning words have cooled on the anvil of the page.
That’s all, you see. It floods my body, distils my senses, overtakes my brain. It’s like a physical itch, but one no one can scratch.
And until the words overflow, I am cut off. Alienated. Alone.
Stuck in the world inside my head.
Hello, hello, is anybody out there?
***
Someone once told me that a typewriter is the only way around writer’s block. ‘There’s a freedom in knowing that you can’t delete what’s been written. It’s the only way to get the words out,’ they said. Said, uttered, advised, commanded, declared.
My typewriter is rusty with disuse. Disuse, unuse, lack of use, no use at all?
That used to be my talent. Used to be. I had a basic idea - say, perhaps, a girl, sitting in a room by the sea, pen in hand, her younger sister watching television in the next room. I could always see her in my mind. A red t-shirt, perhaps, and a knitted cardigan: hanging around her like it was chiffon, not grey wool.
I can see her now. And I would start with a basic description. An old lady of a girl, perhaps, or a statue of a person, like in the last story I wrote.
Last, final, absolute, ultimate…
I’m sorry. This is the only way my talent manifests itself now. Strings of words: random, disconnected, rambling.
At first they all thought I was a genius. The critics, standing round at my book launches with their golden glasses of champagne, lauding, praising, applauding with all the façaded fervour they could muster. ‘He’s unlike anything that’s been seen before - so young, so inexperienced, and yet so…indescribable!’
‘It’s fantastic, darling, simply fantastic,’ one drawled at me, cigarette drooping from one long manicured hand. ‘You must write, write, write, you cannot deprive the world of your talent!’
I didn’t choose to.
God damn her, she’s hanging in my mind. That girl, damn her! With her red t-shirt that screams ‘Rock is dead’ and the too-long grey tracksuit pants, and the grey cardigan pulled close about her, hugging the curve of her hip. Crossing the balcony, grimacing as her feet get wet from the rain that pools on the tiles, staring out into the waves and wishing that the grey would never go away.
Go away, damn you! Don’t you understand? I can’t write any more. I can’t write any more. Don’t you understand, you spectre, you phantom? Stop coming to me, demon, go to someone else who can tell your story! Someone I used to know, someone who thinks like all the rest of them, ‘poor boy, he could have done it, but he went all peculiar in the end!’
Hypocrites. Sipping their champagne, genteelly tapping out with one finger on their sleek polished laptops with the bitten apple on the cover. I suppose it never occurred to them that even their computers betrayed how canon they all were: the bitten apple, Snow White, the Grimm brothers. The original, wasn’t it? They write under the apple, and nothing ever changes, nothing original comes out of them, nothing. Perhaps that was the witch’s real curse.
They all formed their little club, and stuck together. ‘The Writer’s Club’, the indie magazines used to call it, laughingly. ‘What has the writer’s club been up to this week, readers?’
God rot them all. As soon as they realised there was no more story, no more silvertongue words, they all tiptoed away in the night. Just like the morally compromised villains in their cheap paperbacks. ‘I shouldn’t leave my friend,’ they reason to themselves, ‘but what can I do to help? Better off on my own.’
And now the void yawns before me, filled with the words that torment my mind night and day. But that itch is gone, the water too low to ever overflow once more, the storms absent from my mind and soul. And I stand tapping on the glass, waiting for someone, anyone, to listen to me.
Won’t you come and help me stir the waters again, help the words flood my soul, give me a reason to oil up my typewriter?
Hello, hello, isn’t anybody out there?
Hello?
You see…it’s been a long time since I’ve written. And when the words flood you again, well...
It’s down deep in your belly. Down where the pains come, every month. I always imagine it just like a deep black sea of the void, lapping gently at the edges; it must be mounted on internal gyroscopes, I think. Because whether I sit or lie or dance or sing or fall, it always stays the same. No disturbance, always so urbanely smooth. Until, of course, it storms inside my head, and then it miraculously transfers to my brain, and pushes at the inside of my skull til I can feel the little jabs. Physical i-want-out’s, trapped inside my head, the precursor to the flood. But elsewise, it just sits there, lapping, lapping at the edges of stone, and I live around it. Live, die, sorrow, celebrate, dance, jump, fall.
I wonder if it would show up on an x-ray? A falling me, hanging brokenly on the air, while I spun helplessly around this black void inside me. Snapshot of a moment. A freeze-frame in time.
What a picture that would make for the critics to crowd around with their glasses of champagne. Artist, 16, At One With The Void. Medium: portions of the electromagnetic spectrum, transparent plastic, black and white. Dedicated to the room a woman must always have.
Artist, 16, At One With The Void.
At One with it? What are you talking about?
The only time I’m at one with it is when it floods with words. Literally, a flood. Fragments of letters, they toss and sway and crash against the stone until it gives way, and then it floods my body. And all I can do is write. Let the words overflow while my fingers itch and my knuckles spasm slowly in a hunger for the keyboard. A pen. The trance of language where all one can do is helplessly vomit up the words onto the page like you’ve been fed an emetic. They pour out of you like black tea from a tilted teapot, and spread on to the page. But no one can right this teapot, until the burning words have cooled on the anvil of the page.
That’s all, you see. It floods my body, distils my senses, overtakes my brain. It’s like a physical itch, but one no one can scratch.
And until the words overflow, I am cut off. Alienated. Alone.
Stuck in the world inside my head.
Hello, hello, is anybody out there?
***
Someone once told me that a typewriter is the only way around writer’s block. ‘There’s a freedom in knowing that you can’t delete what’s been written. It’s the only way to get the words out,’ they said. Said, uttered, advised, commanded, declared.
My typewriter is rusty with disuse. Disuse, unuse, lack of use, no use at all?
That used to be my talent. Used to be. I had a basic idea - say, perhaps, a girl, sitting in a room by the sea, pen in hand, her younger sister watching television in the next room. I could always see her in my mind. A red t-shirt, perhaps, and a knitted cardigan: hanging around her like it was chiffon, not grey wool.
I can see her now. And I would start with a basic description. An old lady of a girl, perhaps, or a statue of a person, like in the last story I wrote.
Last, final, absolute, ultimate…
I’m sorry. This is the only way my talent manifests itself now. Strings of words: random, disconnected, rambling.
At first they all thought I was a genius. The critics, standing round at my book launches with their golden glasses of champagne, lauding, praising, applauding with all the façaded fervour they could muster. ‘He’s unlike anything that’s been seen before - so young, so inexperienced, and yet so…indescribable!’
‘It’s fantastic, darling, simply fantastic,’ one drawled at me, cigarette drooping from one long manicured hand. ‘You must write, write, write, you cannot deprive the world of your talent!’
I didn’t choose to.
God damn her, she’s hanging in my mind. That girl, damn her! With her red t-shirt that screams ‘Rock is dead’ and the too-long grey tracksuit pants, and the grey cardigan pulled close about her, hugging the curve of her hip. Crossing the balcony, grimacing as her feet get wet from the rain that pools on the tiles, staring out into the waves and wishing that the grey would never go away.
Go away, damn you! Don’t you understand? I can’t write any more. I can’t write any more. Don’t you understand, you spectre, you phantom? Stop coming to me, demon, go to someone else who can tell your story! Someone I used to know, someone who thinks like all the rest of them, ‘poor boy, he could have done it, but he went all peculiar in the end!’
Hypocrites. Sipping their champagne, genteelly tapping out with one finger on their sleek polished laptops with the bitten apple on the cover. I suppose it never occurred to them that even their computers betrayed how canon they all were: the bitten apple, Snow White, the Grimm brothers. The original, wasn’t it? They write under the apple, and nothing ever changes, nothing original comes out of them, nothing. Perhaps that was the witch’s real curse.
They all formed their little club, and stuck together. ‘The Writer’s Club’, the indie magazines used to call it, laughingly. ‘What has the writer’s club been up to this week, readers?’
God rot them all. As soon as they realised there was no more story, no more silvertongue words, they all tiptoed away in the night. Just like the morally compromised villains in their cheap paperbacks. ‘I shouldn’t leave my friend,’ they reason to themselves, ‘but what can I do to help? Better off on my own.’
And now the void yawns before me, filled with the words that torment my mind night and day. But that itch is gone, the water too low to ever overflow once more, the storms absent from my mind and soul. And I stand tapping on the glass, waiting for someone, anyone, to listen to me.
Won’t you come and help me stir the waters again, help the words flood my soul, give me a reason to oil up my typewriter?
Hello, hello, isn’t anybody out there?
Hello?