From summer 2007:
Listening to: The Chemical Brothers – Chico’s Groove
posted with FoxyTunes
“You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. “
–Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
—-
Playwriting Fall 2007 – personal manifesto
I write because I think, because I cannot stop thinking, because I feel, because I cannot stop feeling, because the crux I think of human consciousness and human sadness is that we must both think and feel, every day, all of the time. I write because it is a shame that we live and a tragedy that we can only live once, and writing lets me live an infinite number of lives while still never letting me escape my own life.
I write because I cannot not write. I write because I write because I write because I write. Because I love the sound of words, of repetition and the very delicate line between meaning and meaninglessness that dissolves and reappears and dissolves again depending how you say words and how you listen to them. I write because I want to hear other people say my words, I want to hear how they change character and depth and texture by being spoken in someone else’s voice, in the unique resonating chamber of their body, with the weight of their life and mind and mindlessness shaping every vibration. I write stories because I want to see how they change within other people, stretching fathoms deeper or shallower than I ever anticipated in my own mind, in my own voice.
I write because not all of the things that I want are real, and I write because too many of the things I dream of are.
I write because I have ghosts beneath my skin and eyelids and I think that you do, too, and I think that it’s possible that they are the same ghosts haunting both of us at once.
I write because I am afraid of death even though I dream of it every night, sometimes with longing.
I write because I am a system of chemicals and electricity, a product of biology and physics and accidents, of dependency and attraction and addiction and the flow of hormones and enzymes that I can barely fathom, that I only know in the breaking of my heart and the beating of my blood and the taste of my loneliness. And I write to ask the question, am I alone? Am I the only one playing hide and seek lost and found with myself and everything else, always? And I write to answer these questions because I hope that there is someone else out there wondering the answer.
I write because I like my handwriting, because I like the feeling of typing with numb fingers, because when I was little I was lonely and found more solace in the worlds I could make of paper than the one that I was forced to live in. I write because I care about the rules of grammar, the admonition to not end sentences with prepositions and the protocol of punctuation, and I love to bend these rules to the breaking point.
I write because I am afraid of the impermanence of speech even as I am in love with it. I write because I can always edit the written word, delete, revise, expound, and I cannot do this when I speak. I write because I dislike the sound of my own voice.
I write because the only way I can know what I truly think, what I truly feel, is by listening to the words coming out of my mouth fingers when I tell someone, and when I write I can be telling anyone and everyone even though it is more often no one.
I write because just like everybody else I think I’m abnormal.
I write because just like everybody else I am haunted.
I write because whining just isn’t good enough.
I write because people are always jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge into the Golden Gate, because mothers drown their children, because people lie awake and dying from the monsters in their blood, because such monsters exist, because the earth is tilting beneath me, because entropy only increases, and because despite all of these things trees still grow so I can kill them and write poems to their beauty on their bleached white flesh. Because we are murderers, each of us, because to be alive is to murder. Because I want the spilling of my blood to mean more than hemoglobin and plasma and mess.
None of these reasons are new, or original, or even very interesting. I’m not even sure if all of them are true, or if their truth is like everything else – flickering and subjective (which is another reason why I write). I write because I write, and because you asked me to do so.
—
Fall 2006, over a boy I thought that I might have fallen in love with and who I then never really saw again:
why do i like you so much?
