Menacingly, I have to laugh at myself as the copy paper reflects my mind: empty. All the days in the classroom and all the hours spent studying that I said "when I have time I will start my novel" have culminated into this frustrating tease that is the ever infamous "writer's block." Oh, but those words cannot be said, even a mention of the curse is enough to begin plague of creative blockades.

I spend much of my free time secluded and alone with the company of jazz and Schoenberg writing away at something. It is this passion that I pursue that I use to justify my existence and I cannot seem to make the words come through. The pressure one faces when they dare call themself a writer! I sit with a shaking hand and an ancient nausea arising from the deep and I begin to write, anything, and I wince almost as if to say that nothing is better than this rubbish! But then the ice breaks and the words flow from beyond my conscious mind and I watch the pen recite lines of forgotten literature and poetry I have studied years ago warp themselves into the worn structure that is the tragedy. The words find me and I weep in thanks for the bursting of the dam and writing, dear, writing, is like a craft that is not to be treated as a job. When the task of exploration that is writing is used to give one's self a title, that is when the glory, the honor, and the meaning are lost in the art.

So, a work of art becomes vain when one sees it as a work of art. Those words from the depths that arise in the need to answer a question are the purest means of writing. One does not write to be a writer, one writes to pursue and understand that which is in the clouds and in the hearts of man. "Writer's Block" is disintegrated in the simple presence of a passion. What is it that we wish to solve? What do we have a knowledge of and how can we further it? Ask questions, they reveal to the writer themself, and from there the words flow. Suffering is universal; whatever plagues the mind is always a good source for working the pen. Let the truth be known and shine your light into the depths of suffering.

I caught her one last time and her slender frame and auburn hair were sitting in the autumn sunlight and I can almost dare say “beautiful.” I fall in love too easily, goodness.

The day was fresh, new, vibrant, all the damn adjectives, and I felt myself drifting away from the depths of my mind and I, for a moment, did not mind. I was falling into an ease, my consciousness, that bloody thing.

What folly is this? Has the trenchman of the mind lost his focus? Why do you so direly wish to escape your pursuit? It is imperative you remain attached to your search, you are falling into those who you despise most! You know your heart so dearly wishes to find something to latch on to, even though you know it is poison. Bloody poison! Idols are nothing but evil, for they corrupt the independence of a man, they corrupt his vision, his freedom (if such a thing exists I am still yet to determine). Us foul creatures cannot help but look up to something, if only I knew why we can never appreciate what we have here.

Perhaps that is the cause of all misery, our need to look upward. It is a dangerous perilous thing we aim ourselves at, that something greater just out of our reach, beyond us. We have no capacities to hold those blessings which await in the heavens, we have not even the slightest bit of good about us, and we are wretched and ungrateful beyond a doubt for what is here in the now. But still we stretch, and that is the curious mystery of man. We are forever in pursuit of that which is beyond us, failing to focus on ourselves, us who are here alone, the gods of our own Being. If only our outstretched hands were in a reflection! How great can we be then? Oh but abstractions and hope are themselves in the clouds which I detest. I will never not be a contradiction.

I don’t like to waste time and hold hope too tightly, for that is a dangerous distraction from what is. There is only now and the future and the past are illusions that we mistake as the keys to immortality. What if man was to see now as genuinely now? What if Being in the moment was actually taken seriously? We are only men, though, how are we to ever take anything seriously and gravely. Man lives in a crisis of blindness.

The room was narrow, with the low ceilings creating a sense of claustrophobia for visitors. However, it was a pleasant setting for the inhabitant of the room, who found its crushing style to be the perfect conditions for work. Work of what sort? Well, writing of course. The profession that is not what it is, the job that never becomes one, and the title taken by anyone with a bit of arrogance. It takes a certain amount of pretentiousness to pick up the pen and make a statement about life. How much can the writer know, anyway? Not much, even if it is significantly higher than what the reader knows.

So how could such a setting produce a comfortable stay for the writer? Well, it puts them under pressure, of course. The symbolic significance of the room is what makes it hold its value. One must enter hunched over and careful not to step on writings or trip over open books. It is full of books too, I should mention. Most of them are unread and pretty on the shelf, while those that were read have been read and read again with the damage to their spines as proof. There is a stack of notebooks in the corner of the writer's den. College ruled paper, preferably, or for some, a must, and a pack of recently bought pens sit there next to the couch. Oh, and the couch. It is the device of the writer to buttonhole anyone who feels a need to stop by. The alcoholic that they are makes them have to invite them to a drink, simply so that they can too, and they lay out their ideas to boredom and polite agreement. The writer knows that their friend doesn't care, but he continues anyway because their passion for their work leaves them lonely and misunderstood. The writer often finds themselves there.

The cliches they run from often become reality, and they can't help but fall into the labels they swore they'd never bear. The writer cannot escape that they have become what they are, so they simply abandon ship altogether. They leave their work behind in mad disgust, throw it away and vow to burn it. Their work is trash, rubbish, and worn out, their fear eats at them now. The very pressure that the room provides is attacking the weak certainties of the writer with full force. It is difficult to pursue the truth, especially since the writer has gone past the charted forest. If they haven't, they are not writers.

They know that no matter how well versed they were in classical literature, they will never be writers because they fail to live.

"What does it mean to live?" they argue. Certainly living is not to stay cooped up in a library, but rather to venture off into the unknown. But then the writer does not write, though. Does the writer need to write when they are living? That is the question. Does the writer sacrifice the immersion of themself in the present moment to immortalize it in written form, or does he rely on his weak memory and faulty certainties to record it later? When do they ever stop living, though? At what point does the writer decide to step out of life and record what has been done? When he hears the sobs of those trapped in the chains of tyranny. The bold hero within, the golden heart, the quick hand, and the hope to make change are released into the world from the shaking hand of the writer and they begin their struggle to the light.

The writer will find a home in the hearts of those who read their works only when it does not dance around the issue or fall so deep into symbolism the point is hidden in it, and instead pursues the truth like mad and wishes to use it to free those in the tyranny of suffering and meaninglessness. The writer is to be a lone star in the night sky and a soft burning bonfire in the heart of December, they are to provide hope in the now, and only live so long as that needs to be done. Even the brightest stars and fires die eventually, and a writer can too wear out his welcome unless he continues to push for change, whether that be within themself or the world around them. Once they have lost that desire, they too have lost the title that is not what it is.

So to be a writer is to be ever fluid and rigidly religious to the principle of advancement, to be under pressure from no one and everyone, to live with the strongest desire to be what they can be, and most importantly, to maintain hope to the strongest degree that things can be pushed further than ever before and in the push, in the struggle, that even the impossible can be conquered with the forces of faith and hope. To be a writer is to walk with a foot in time and the other in the realm of the gods. There is but one thing that a writer is to be: not a writer.