I feel like a horrible writer. Most of what echoes voicelessly in my mind and heart is perfectly articulated by so many other people. So what use would my own unique experience, not so unique at all, be to anyone who has encountered so many other perfect prayers and poets? I cannot even write of something or someone without relating it to my own heart, and I don't know what this has to do with the previous sentences, but it makes me feel acutely self-conscious. Maybe that self-consciousness is a part of my imperfect but somewhat truthful, though terribly fractured way of putting myself in others' shoes and peering at myself through their eyes.
But these silly, silly cries of pain, oh Seymour, do not matter because I am dramatist. The child still asks, simplemindedly and innocently, "but why should it not matter? Why shouldn't there still be something under it all?" We are all wounded I suppose, but why would that make any individuals' wounds any less important, to them or others? A wound is not healed if it is ignored because it hurts to touch. It must be examined thoroughly, prayed over, medicated and bound.
Can you see me perusing the book-shelves of my ribcage, pulling out one tome and selecting a passage before moving on to the next book and running my finger down its pages to find the words highlighted in my own rainbow blood? But then, would I even know if you did the same in your head?
A Zen master once said a person can not exchange even so much as a fart with another person. This is something that still puzzles me; I understand, I think, the meaning and thought-process behind this, but in my experience, in my great dream, it does not seem true. I am a sponge to life and people and beauty and nature and animals. I am a sponge in my own experience, and so, all I am is not entirely of me, or rather, it is entirely of me in relation to my life and all that entails. Oh god, I share and am shared by everything, life running through me and you and the stones on the ground.
I read "Seymour: An Introduction", and I marvel at the flow of words and the brightness of every person, of Seymour, and the illuminator that is the narrator, Buddy Glass. Neither of them exist anywhere but in the mind of JD Salinger, but, love, they are so real, it is like they created themselves. Children of the mind, as it were... How strange, how beautiful.
Seymour living, breathing, dead; but also a mirror, reflecting you and me and my father. But you see my quandary; why should I write so clumsily when everywhere I turn I see my own heart reflected in the minds and works of other people? It's funny, seeing this makes me feel completely inadequate, but it also awakens that deep itch to write and draw and try my very best to splash my every color every where I can. Both writer's block, a brick wall right in front of the nose; and writer's wound to cause blood to pour through the fingertips onto the page, or keyboard.
Writing and drawing and photographing often drives this itch to distraction, because I see this light, and I feel it on my skin and across my ribs, but it does not transfer well to any page, it seems. And still, even if it did, would it still be what I saw? I am an imperfect translator. But I suppose it wouldn't be so bad, everyone sees everything differently, coloring it with their own brush. I can not make them see what I see. And I suppose that would defeat the purpose of sharing it with them, which would be to watch it under the light of their experience. The very same reason we converse with other human beings instead of sitting on the ground and talking to ourselves and the vast emptiness of personal god.
