Writer’s block [followed by writer’s rush & final block]

by Ştefan Bolea
translated by Oana Popovici

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I had reached a dead end. I had commenced to cherish the virtues of the year – 1 again. The conspicuous apocrypha. The exorbitant gravitational force of melancholy. The stuffy atmosphere, the burdening spirit, were enshrouding me like a sepulchre. An idiot trauma was eating me inside like the fat worm feasting itself from Banquo’s mummified soul. And the abominable alliance of my instincts was bestirring my melancholy as if it was a survival mechanism. Likewise, I was experiencing a feeling of aversion towards my creation. Do you want to overcome yourself? Do you want to grow like a black cloud auguring a hurricane? Do you want to be the crescent moon from Baiazid’s Scrisoarea III? Do you want to be Dwayne Wade’s snake bite, dagger or slam-dunk over five shields? “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds…” You will never be one of the above. But you will nurture even more hate and resentment and feed yourself with vitriol love. You are going through the phase of the conqueror’s or the slave owner’s depression, and not that of the incapable, frustrate man that blames it all on the sour grapes. And yet, no matter how pleased you may be for the accomplishment of something, you feel loathe. You are disgusted by the realisatio, you discover your insignificance, the outstandingly encouraging feeling of facelessness, the disappointment of a disagreement that slaps you with sharp claws… The feeling of dissatisfaction and repulsion, the impression of an inner hole, or, if I were to invoke a cliché, the feeling that you threw yourself into a fountain and you just don’t reach its end once and for all, the bit of terror lasting as long as the temporal distance from the Bing Bang to the Apocalypse; all these – say “unfulfillments” – feed your ego, sharpen your desire and render your acute perception.

You resist all obstacles, even though you know that you are made of the last cell, because it is only from your inner self that the buds of creation sprout. To cut a long story short, this was the general background. I found my way out of the grave thanks to the succession of three favourable circumstances. I was feeling like in Limitless, I was having some brilliant structural ideas, I was writing as in a rapt of trance and then I was waking up. Have I woken up? I’m not sure yet, maybe this is just a false awakening. You have to struggle constantly, otherwise you shall constantly lose. In other words, I was enjoying the feeling of treading on virgin realms, even if they were mined. One summer, the idea of suicide was obsessing me so I was writing an essay about it (I had previously read a lot of Anthropology and Sociology). I had somehow rounded it up, although I wasn’t really happy with my conclusions. I took one step back right before the climax and, having noticed that I had embraced a rather commonsensical attitude (a type of attitude that could have been adopted by another foolhardy also), I noticed that another risky option was laying out for me and I was being given the chance to bet on it, even though nobody would have followed me down that path. So I adjusted myself to it although it has been really difficult for me to defend or bring arguments in support of my new hypothesis. I somehow felt I was letting myself out, I was seeing/thinking beyond the mundane, and maybe this is a mere detail or maybe it isn’t, but I was actually learning to grasp transgression. I have two more things to say about the act of writing, one that irritates me and another one that I actually find funny, I real ego booster. Words don’t (really) matter. Had the creative intensity of the feelings that wrote my poems would have found its echo in the Universe, signs on the sky, earthquakes or interplanetary collisions would have occurred and the Gods would have been tormented by insomnia. At a much lower level, I only wanted to see that somebody’s sense and sensibility had been at least slightly touched. Anybody’s. It feels like masturbation sometimes… You write, take death inside your heart, because you kill natural life when you live in the writer’s time and sometimes purposelessness makes you choke or puke. On the other side, I am perfectly articulate, you can hate me but you know I’m right. I can find my words in such a way that I confer them the dexterity and the sharpness of a white weapon. However, I sometimes think of blocking the access to the EgoPHobia editorials and divulging the password only to those who reach the rim of epilepsy because of disgust and revolt. For those who destroy with their creations, I would write personalized texts, with certain instructions, just like in the Mayhem project: if we can’t stab the system, why don’t we indulge ourselves into little sabotage gestures that do no harm anybody but do raise a lot of questions? Sometimes, this also seems lame to me and I feel like blocking the access to all my texts, keeping the password for myself only. On the other hand, the act of writing seems to be a mere fatality and I wish to end my career with books more than 1000 pages long, all posthumous, of course. I’m starting to feel that I’m hard to follow and I really need a cigarette break so that’s it.