In bed with Boredom, I licked Writer’s Block

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Concerto No. 21 is playing andante at YouTube while I am wrestling with two demons over what to write.

I am sitting in front of my computer, shirtless because of the heat, wiping off my brow then and now the sweat that, left on its own devices, would moist my eyes and clog the vision. Upstairs, Lara and Lilac are switching television channels. Their mother, I think, is asleep. It is a gloomy Sunday evening, with no promise of a tidy—even happy—Monday.

It is towards the end of May; summer is a memory; and the rains have come, but when it comes to what to write, I am predisposed to think that writing does not concern itself at all with the seasons.

There is one thing certain: the wedding month is on the verge of not letting the flower month complete itself, yet I still have to see my favorite flowers—rosal and ponograpo—which at this time of the year are in full bloom in Masudsud. That’s in faraway Sibale.

I think of Flores de Mayo and the nightly dances that signal summer’s exit; of the yinumakang pinungo splattered with blobs of margarine; and of the tinuyang pakoy from the patikyar it bobo that feeds the people of the whole village. I feel a certain kind of hunger that memory aggravates but cannot alleviate.

I don’t feel good. I’m missing something I don’t know what. The body to which the head and hands and feet are attached seemed to complain of tiredness. Inside is a murmur, heard through aching limbs and the smoker’s cough, telling me I should lie down. Rest. To this murmur, however, the writing mind disagrees. I have to write. Tony Macalisang, my publisher, is calling.

But what to write? That’s a question I always ask myself when a visitor, known in the village as Writer’s Block, comes through my front door without advance notice, not even the courtesy of a knock. No, I think she—my unwelcome guest is a female—comes through the window.

She came tonight, this familiar visitor. I quickly offered her coffee and biscuits hoping she would as just quickly leave to visit other writers, but she refused my hospitality and indicated she would stay by sitting right up on the edge of my writing table. I think she likes to watch me not able to write, delights in my torment of not being able to summon the usual companions in bed—the Words that are my truest friends.

Because she was adamant to leave, I ended up drinking the coffee and eating the biscuits that were for her. She tried to throw me off balance and out of focus by simply being there, intently eyeing me as I sit wordless—and thus, motionless—for what seemed an eternity in front of a blank, white screen whose only sign of life was the blinking bar for a writing guide. Her throwing me furtive glances forced sweat to form in my forehead and eyebrows. Her gaze was steady and penetrating. And I have nothing to write.

Over her long, unwanted presence, I had to put up with another visitor—his name is Boredom—by snatching Nadine Gordimer from the shelf and leafing through her essays collectively called “Living in Hope and History”.

Boredom is husband to Writer’s Block. The couple unsettles the writer and is happy to see him, well, unsettled.

If Boredom sends the writer—and the non-writers—to suffer bouts of restlessness, Writer’s Block renders him impotent. Their capability to spring surprise—coming as they do in unholy hours, when no one is looking, and when the mind is idle and therefore fertile to temptation, is one of those hazards writers try very hard to avoid, but nevertheless, face every day. In fact, every writing day.

Their power does not so much lie in their ability to stall the creative process as to their persistent effort to blunt the imagination, thereby stanching the flow of creative juices that is the writer’s elixir. Stalled and deprived of the power to imagine, the writer suffers from temporary paralysis. Writer’s Block and Boredom succeeding means they are able to transport the writer at will to a state of utter uselessness. If the writer succumbs, he is dead—as a writer.

Having arrived at this terrible conclusion, and fearing for the occurrence of such a debilitating condition, I tried to keep my eyes open, awake, by reading. Writer’s Block’s enticing proposition not to write and Boredom’s delectable allusion to happiness derived from being restless have an antidote: books.

Books inside whose pages are words that have been formed when Boredom and Writer's Block were not around, perhaps because they were visiting other writers’ houses. Paragpraphs after paragraphs of words that have flowed out of the imagination that the husband-and-wife team, helpless when the writer decides to write, was unable to stanch because the writer at the time of the creation of such words, such paragraphs, was more powerful—and wilful.

Unburdened and un-distracted by the presence of the team, he proceeds to the task, slowly at first, but determined and forceful until such time that he is unable to restrain himself because the dictates of the imagination was so overpowering that to stop now, here, will secede to the team a territory larger than the edge of the writing table they now occupy.

“In the beginning was the Word. “The Word was with God, signified God’s Word, the word that was Creation.”

Nadine Gordimer’s.

And that’s how I licked the demons called Boredom and Writer’s Block.

I began with a word. Word after word, paragraph after paragraph, until I get here, the end of this piece, when I decided to follow Jean Paul Sartre’s admonition that a writer should sometimes cease to write. For now.