You can tell the wind is out of my writing sails when, for lack of anything else worthwhile to post, I dig up and edit a story I wrote as an email to Kat a few months back. I am uninspired. The 29th is CRN’s third anniversary, and I am beginning to wonder if I have run out of things to say.
It’s odd. Sometimes I’ll toss up a post out of a sheer dull feeling of obligation to put something up here, just sit down for twenty minutes and hammer something out, and if I’m lucky the mere act of typing becomes at least a little inspiring and my twenty minutes of writing becomes something I later appreciate.
But more often, lately, it’s just a pedestrian rant that emerges from that metaphorical peristalsis. Or snide joking. Stuff the world would be better off without. I look at it and I’m embarrassed to have it displayed here.
And that’s the stuff that gets linked, most often. I’m not complaining, mind: the fact that people find my writing worthwhile is one of the chief joys of this brief life. But I feel utterly out of touch with my readers. The writing of mine I like most rarely engenders so much as a single comment.
I’m not about to hang this up. This too shall pass, and this sort of uninspired malaise is often just an eddy in the aching floods that propel some of my best writing. In any event, I have an intriguing guest-blogging possibility coming up next month that might prove restorative.
Besides. There are others who have passed this way before. Norbizness is celebrating his own three-year blogging anniversary today, and I feel like a little whiner talking about my own lack of inspiration on his big day. He’s a bit of a role model for me in this respect. Having read his blog for a couple years now, I have watched him fight his own obvious battles with long, long bouts of complete lack of inspiration. But does he let that yawning void of nothing worthwhile to say keep him from posting, day after day, like clockwork? Not on your life. My hat is off to you, Norbiz, and I only hope that someday you might find a little of that inspiration in my own uninspired, rote plodding.
That was the Faustian bargain when I jumped off blogspot in January 2004: sure I could format, but I’d have nothing to say! Fuck you, Rod Serling!
Plus, if I don’t post, the clown will eat me.
This has something to do with my linking to you, doesn’t it? Hm? It must be about me!
Actually, for many of your posts, what else is there to say but, “wow.” Which gets trite.
Maybe we could take a moon calendar, Bay Area tide charts, the Mayan and Zorastrian siderial astrological tables, and determine if there is any coorelation to the up and down swells of your writing motivation. I don’t think knowing that would matter, other than to give you something to write about at certain times of the month. You do fine even when you aren’t inspired.
Don’t measure the depth of connection by the number of comments, Mr Clarke. We’ve both been blogging long enough to know that people comment not when you’ve said something insightful, but when they feel they have something insightful to say back. Sometimes you blow me away. I don’t have anything remotely commensurate to say back, so I don’t say anything.
Here’s my guru moment (credit cards accepted, thank you): you have to breathe out, before you can breathe in. I’m thinking maybe you don’t need inspiration so much as exhalation right now.
But I feel utterly out of touch with my readers. The writing of mine I like most rarely engenders so much as a single comment.
Boy, do I hear you on that one.
Listen to dale. He’s got good advice.
Sure, I could always leave comments saying things like, “Damn, I wish I’d written this myself. But I’ve never even been to the desert. I rarely get out of the city. I mean, I love the city, but this nature writing of yours, it gives me yearnings to skedaddle out of civilization. But there’s so much tying me to the city, the here and now, not least of which the raising of my kid…” But then it would be all about me.
Plus, dammit, I don’t even like poetry, but that squirrel ode was moving.
uninspired? you kidding? i’m with dale, too.
Who else blogs about the East Mojave? And Victor Jara? And counts vertical feet? And wears the same boots I do? Not that it’s about what I like, just that I enjoy the sense of commonality, or the dearth of common-ness (in the sense of mainstream mediocrity), that I find in your posts. You betta keep writin’, or I’m gonna look you up and make you go hiking with me, so I can continue to get my fix of your perspective. A big thank you is in order for how much you’ve contributed to my daily sensibilities. So - Thanks!
Today my Newfie dog tugged on my hand to pull me out into the sunshine for a walk. His favorite to plunder the tiny stream that spring rains have given us, then a quick roll in the bands of grass growing taller by the minute. I live in a wonderous place. But sometimes it takes a wet muzzle to entice me out to for a regeneration spot. Each week, I remind myself, a new family of birds has arrived after the enormous quiet of a cold hard winter. This week it is the orioles and they are glorious. My cat had a tussle with a momma grouse this morning outside my window. The grouse is pretty simple minded (and that’s being kind) but rotund and turned out to be a bit more of an adventure than kitty had planned on. Score one for Grouse. Sometimes, even surrounded by the energy of spring galloping along, the wind simply doesn’t fill your sails. Not to worry, perhaps the full moon coming soon will make you smile.
i dont know if i have commented before. certainly not recently. i rarely comment because i believe my comments are not worth reading generally. it would get boring eventually if i said how fantastic most of your posts are after every one. please be assured, chris, that every morning i look forward to a little slice of your life, good and bad. sometimes i am transported, at other times angry and sometimes indifferent to your offerings but they are always worth a look. keep on trucking!!!
Chris, Substantial People read your blog. Thing is, they’re the ones least likely to have the time to comment. :D
You have yet to exhaust reader interest in the early-life adventures of Zeke, seems to me. Tell us the story of Zeke’s Best Day, for instance.
(And if you’da read my stuff, you’da GOTTEN some new ideas.)
Chris, others (especially dale and Fred) said what I was thinking. It seems like the more one of your posts touches me, the less likely I am to comment. It probably has something to do with the yawning chasm between your ability to express yourself and mine. For what it’s worth, the only blog I check every day (actually I missed yesterday) is yours.
The word I would use is “complete.”
A lot of your writing leaves nothing to add. Any comment simply feels like it takes away from your perfect “completeness.”
Which means that your writing does not always invite conversation, participation, the jostling of ideas or different views.
Joe Campbell described the hero’s journey. You go out into the wilderness. You find a treasure and wrest it from the forces that be. You bring it back. You share it and make it real for others.
The nature of treasure is we simply enjoy it. If we’re wise we say “thank you” every once in awhile.
But if we say “ooh,” “ahh,” and “wow” too often you’ll just think we’re soft in the head.
Thanks thanks thanks for what you do.
/ehj2
I realized during my drive home tonight that this thread brings us back to a conversation we joined at Twisty’s a while back on the subject of art and pornography.
During that conversation, you provided links to two beautiful renderings of nature. I saw your comment late, but your point was that these images instilled some form of desire in the observer (at least in you) and this argued against my contention (poorly expressed) that art suggests completeness and doesn’t invoke or demand any desire or response. Simply, art doesn’t make you want to do or have something because the art itself already fulfills something in you. It was several days before I thought of a more complete response.
Those renderings are art if they aren’t used to sell you anything. They’re pornography otherwise. We typically see the best renderings of wilderness and nature in advertising with a car somewhere in the picture. Wilderness is free and part of the suggestion is that buying the car will get you that; freedom and empowerment and escape. It’s always a wrenching dichotomy for me to see, however, because I view the car as one of the greatest threats to wilderness, in the form of highways and parking lots. (And for most people it’s not an escape either, but years of bondage to a bank somewhere.)
If the renderings of nature are used to sell you on the idea of building you a house with that view, they’re pornography. Even if they’re used to sell you a wilderness jaunt, they’re pornography. The wilderness is being offered up to make you want the thing being sold. More subtly, and worse in my mind, is that ads of this nature suggest that the beauty of nature (or a woman) is an object that can be promised to you and sold as an adjunct of the articulated exchange. The peace of a sunrise cannot be sold. The softness of a woman’s smile cannot be sold. No car or house in the woods can give you these “things” (in spite of the limitation of our language, these are not objects).
Your writing often suggests stillness, completeness, invites repose. You aren’t selling anything except perhaps the notion that these things are important and we should strive to honor and protect them.
The Marlborough Man is pure pornography. There’s no integrity in the ads at all. You aren’t being sold on what a cigarette actually is or what it can actually do for you. Yet we’re so used to being offered an image instead of substance that we learn to automatically invest the image with something and think it’s there. But who would buy a cigarette, or a hummer, based on an honest accounting of what these things are and do?
When a pretty woman is used to sell something else, and purposely linked to it to as an object, that’s pornography.
Notice that even in the crudest sexual pornography (the kind generally addressed by the Twisty faction), sex (and often beauty) is used to sell something else that’s almost invisible to most people. What’s being sold is violence, not romance, woman as object, not sex.
You may not be comfortable with the term “artist,” but you are certainly one who works to create completeness in the moment.
Respectfully,
/ehj2
You might feel uninspired yourself, but you certainly have inspired ehj2 (and others).
So interesting to check in w/your blog tonight before turning in and see this post. I had just been thinking that you have been steadily writing things that are interesting and well expressed, and how much I look forward to reading your column as my bedtime story. I am particularly struck by the comment that the writing you like best gets the fewest comments. I don’t know what you like best, but the posts you write that touch me deeply are the ones I am least likely to comment about. The poem about the squirrel made me cry and I could not think what to say to you about that - I was so grateful for the tears and the graceful way you had expressed your dilemna. So thanks for that and for your ‘uninspired’ post tonight which gave me the nudge I needed to let you know how your writing affects me and to thank you for letting me in on it.