Words from beyond the screen

You, in this dark cell! What do you fear?
Is it life outside? The sunny day?
You speak to yourself but do not hear
The shadows laughing at what you say.
This is a world with no atmosphere
Mere illusions we pixels display
Of words and pictures seldom sincere
You sit, and write, and life blows away.
You must get up! Now! Away from here!
The Sun will set, and you will decay
Don't let the web make life disappear
Turn it off now with no more delay!
     But wait! Save my words before you go.
     This is my world and here I must glow.

(São Paulo, October 2004)

Inspiration

Inspiration has left me.

It was here an hour ago,
but I hid from the screen
and from the pen.

Inspiration will be back any moment,
but it will also bring along the pain
that causes its flames.

Inspiration thrives in pain,
in unwanted solitude.

(April 2004)

Great ideas in a frozen well

Nothing to write. It simply doesn't pass. Like ice which won't melt because it is not cold enough. My ideas are frozen. Frozen in my mind like nonsense. They won't get together to bring any sense. They are letters. A mere twenty something and that's it. I need to transform them into something alive. I have to bring it to life, but I can't do much if the ice will not melt.

I can go on, writing and writing. It's the only way I know to make the ice melt. And if I stop, and go for a walk, when I'm back all the hard work is lost once more. All the liquid that protect the good ideas from bad writers has frozen again. I just have to keep writing. Anything, even nonsense, even irrational thoughts, even boring schedule planning or dull technical ideas. If I don't write some ten pages I won't reach the source of this well. If I do it every day I may have less to melt every day, since the ice doesn't return so fast. But if I spend three days or more everything is lost. Good writers write all the time. The well wont give its ideas away so easily. I have to write some ten pages now. If I stop for an hour, I'll have to write eleven. I'll have to write something like that tomorrow, and after tomorrow. After a week things will get easier and I can keep the ice down to a controllable level writing something like three pages a day.

I still have nothing to write but I must go on. I must continue. I feel like leaving this seat and going down to eat something. But if I do, I might lose a paragraph. If I stay down and watch a movie I will lose some two pages. If after the movie I feel sleepy and give up I will lose everything and will have to start again tomorrow. That's the way it is. There is no other way to melt the fucking ice. Reading helps. Reading improves the technique and may help with ideas, but nothing, nothing can replace writing itself. It's the only way. I am not good enough for this well of great ideas. I should try easier and less interesting ones.

But I insist. I want this one. Still no ideas, but I did get rid of a few centimeters. Oh, but it is still very cold out here. I want to stop. No! I have to continue. Hmmm... I will go down and eat something and lose a paragraph, but I will return. I will! I can't afford not to. I have to keep this going. I can't afford to melt all this and lose everything every day. I must reach the turning point. I must! It's the only way my goals will be reached. I will be back in a paragraph.

Well, I'm back. Shit! This is the lost paragraph. I don't know what to put in it. I can just keep writing. I should get at least some six lines. But I can't just write nonsense all the time. Imagine a book of nonsense! Every nonsense paragraph, in some sense, is a lost one. I write nonsense just to keep writing, but I have to remember it is lost. It's like rubbing the ice too softly, or like melting one side, forgetting it, and doing the other side, and then returning to find everything frozen again. This is a lost paragraph, but I should continue. Only by continuing to write will I get somewhere. I still don't know if I'll get there. What if I don't? Will I repeat myself forever? I'll probably lose my readers with so much repetition (if I haven't yet). But then I can erase the lost paragraphs and publish them somewhere. In my blog, maybe. This is the lost paragraph, and it closes this story of pure nonsense. It could have let the ideas free, and I could have started a nice story from here, but the fact is that the ice has unfortunately frozen again. No story will ever float to the surface of this well.

Desperately in need of rationality

This is from one of my now extinct anonymous blogs. I guess no one ever read it. It never got any comments. I hated it when I published it, but now I sort of like it, so I resurrect it in this blog. It was written in 2003.

I need to write. For distraction, perhaps. So I can forget things, or, at least, not think so much about them. I need to write so I can say to someone, my reader, which may never exist, but that does not matter now, so I can tell him about my feelings, about my misdirected love, about my illusions and how I hang on to them and how they affect my soul. I need to write because I am alone in this miserable hotel and do not have anyone to talk to. I need to write because I need a friend, someone who understands my crazy thoughts, my insanity, my uniqueness or strangeness, or even my sameness.

I need to write to increase the speed of time flow, or at least, increase the perceived speed, since time may not even flow. Time has to flow fast so the day when I may have a second chance comes fast, or, at least, the day when I know I won't have the second chance. I am in the state of Schrödinger's cat, nor dead, nor alive. I can't wait until the day of judgment when my fate will be decided. But it takes too long. Time slows down and the next moment seems to never arrive. It's as if I were approaching a black hole, and time would slow down, more and more, the closer I got, and the whole existence of the Universe could happen several times and the moment of impact never come. Writing kind of gets me off the black box, for a while, and as an external observer, I can enjoy the conventional passing of time and finally see the arrival of my fate.

I feel stupid. Stupid for falling in love so easily and not being able to control it. Vulnerable and immature. I feel stupid for letting it take over me and not care about the absence of mutual interest. I feel stupid for believing in conventional patterns of behaviour and letting myself get involved; for believing in eye contact, in touches, in laughter, in romantic opinions and all this psychological crap. I was not able to resist it. Maybe I live in a city where people are less spontaneous and did not understand that people here may be naturally very, very nice without that meaning anything special. Well, not everyone. She was the only one… But maybe she is always like that and nobody really cares.

Maybe she acted like that on purpose. Maybe she knows about the feelings she provokes. She seemed special to me and her reactions made me think I could go farther. But when I tried to, she moved farther away. She fooled me. Or did I fool myself? Anyhow, now I feel stupid because I feel even more like being with her. I did not bear, or accept, the slight rejection. I keep believing she could know me better and have another opinion. Rationally, I know all that is ridiculous, but I am not a rational being. So then, when I think about all of this rationally, I feel stupid.

I will only write one page because I have to work. She inspired in me some adolescent dreams and, at this moment, I do not wish to think about them. I do not wish to feed something that will be denied to me. I will suffer more. I'm no masochist. I will not seek pain gratuitously. I wish today were Monday, but time crawls. Time is my archenemy. Oh… I wish I had her number, but I lost that opportunity. I only have her email, and I don't think she reads it on weekends. And I won't write any shit I may regret via email! I just wanted to stop with all this subjective communication, now! I want to express clear ideas so I will be able to distinguish a 'yes' from a 'no'. I hate any kind of 'perhaps', and this virtual wordless communications seems to me like a real big 'perhaps'. I just want a 'no', a real big one, now, so I can reprogram my dreams, so I can speculate on future adventures and not lose my time with this girl who makes my heart beat when she is near, and makes my chest chill when it all seems to be nothing.

(Some place, some day in April, 2003)