Pause

My writing projects don't seem to work so well. But here's another one anyway. A friend of mine and I decided to write something short (minimum five lines) every week. Kind of a back and forth. He is trying to be more ambitious and do it more often. I'll stick to once a week. Here is his first post, and a poorly transcribed poem which I read before writing this.

He sits at the table marking papers feeling vaguely guilty for neglecting to write something yesterday after he promised he would, and vaguely guilty that he doesn’t write anything at all ever, but only vaguely. Certainly not enough to make him pause and contemplate.

In fact, he thinks, as he reads a long, awkward sentence that incoherently talks about the symbolism of telephones, namelessness, perfect families, and lovers, that he has not paused in a long time to consider things. There have been no doctor’s bags or telephones, or letters from distant lovers. Or if there have been, he hasn’t noticed them. Or if he has noticed them, he has pushed them quickly aside in order to evaluate how well a paper supports its claim that Dr. Seuss books subtly reinforce particular left-wing ideologies.

The vague sense of guilt quickly morphs into a sort of panic as he crosses out an unnecessary and inaccurate generalization about the role of women in “olden times.” If he does not write now, how will he ever write? If he does not stop to contemplate, how will he have anything to write?

Of course, he does not take time to answer these questions. The questions aren’t even articulated clearly in his mind. They float around, unattached to words in a balloon of panic that grows in his head like a blood clot while he tries, instead, to articulate the problems with discussing the relationship between the novel and life as it really was in the 1930s without referring to any historical sources.