Thursday, January 11, 2007

I haven't written in a while, until tonight. I had a fairly traumatic experience about two weeks ago. My computer crashed on News Years Eve--I sat there and watched dumbly as it erased 4 years of my life from itself. Good news was that I had backed up--but not since last February, and I hadn't backed up everything. I put in the CD on which I had saved all of my writing, and there was almost nothing there. I felt like Carrie Bradshaw on that episode of Sex and the City when her computer crashes. The episode ends with something like, "all we can do is breathe and reboot." That's true, that was all that there was left to do. But I was still devastated--even thinking about it now makes me sick to my stomach.

You know, writing is like painting in a lot of ways. A person can never merely reproduce a painting--either his own or anyone else's. Paintings come along in creative surges that must be seized by the artist and acted out before they disappear. The writer must do the same. For the writer, brilliance flickers rarely--words seem to fly out of no where and organize themselves with such clarity the writer needs to physically stop and get them down before they frustratingly disappear forever.

This is why I am so heartbroken over my irreplaceable loss. I cannot remember what it is that I wrote about in the last year, but I remember reading through it all some weeks ago and thinking that I still liked it.

So I haven't written because I am scared to write. I am scared not only by the tiny life crisis erupting in my head at this period of my life, but I am scared of deletion. I have always been afraid of things disappearing from my life, but now, perhaps, I am afraid that my thoughts will leave me too. That those precious moments of brilliance that I managed to take by the horns, my own thoughts, my own ideas, manifestations of my own brain, will be expunged from being. That this will all be deleted, sucked away, wasted by a little machine that arbitrarily decides when it's time to cleanse itself and start anew.

And perhaps it will be. But a true writer cannot help but write through fear. We're pretty used to it, afterall: flying words themselves are pretty scary.

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

To love a country, one must fall in love.

It doesn't matter what he falls in love with. It can be the sunset over the Pacific Ocean on a breezy evening the first night. It can be a color painted on a house that looks like it's falling apart, but he knows is still alive because someone who lives there paid for the paint and painted it that color for a reason. It can be a phrase in a language that he may or may not understand; his first words in that language, or slang that doesn't exist anywhere else but in that town at that very moment. It can be a song that repeats again and again on the radio, or even only once, that is so loved he remembers it days later, is still humming its tune without knowing the words or name. It can be a friend he makes, a woman on the street who shows him the way, a father who mixes strong drinks for recent arrivals, a maid who squeezes fresh juice and kills the spiders in his bedroom.

He can fall in love with a woman. It doesn't matter if she falls for him in return, he needn't even know her--her name, her favorite color--for he can be in love with her smile or her walk or her mere presence. He can fall in love with a night, or with a fantasy. He can fall in love with a smell, a dance, an old blind man sitting on the street corner playing the accordian with a smile on his face because, even though he is blind, there is no real reason to frown. He can fall in love with the strange bed he sleeps in every night. He can fall in love without knowing what he's fallen in love with.

To love a country, one must fall in love with it. He cannot reach every part, he doesn't have time to reflect and weigh those things he likes with those things he doesn't. No, the happy traveler is soaring on love--it is love that makes him stay, keep returning. He must return to his sunset, his song, his woman, that maid, or something like it. He is in love, and thus yearns without his lover near him, dreams of it, fantasizes. Perhaps it is the only bit of ridiculousness he allows himself, and so it exists always like a euphoric drug that he thinks of sipping everyday.

He must be in love afterall, for leaving is heartbreak.