Block

You must not come lightly to the blank page.
- Stephen King


Yep, the Rooster is facing a block. It happens from time to time, and so I figured that instead of just staying away from my writing materials, I would just indulge my block instead of run away from it. So here it is, in real time: my writer's block.



Studies have been done on what causes writer's block, but one piece that I have come to enjoy on the issue comes from a man named Dennis Lee. His essay is titled, "Writing in Colonial Space," and the reason I like it is because he is a poet. Poets are a trip, a breed of their own, and so when one is able to share his or her ideas about writers block, usually a seemingly trite issue suddenly becomes fascinating and complex. While I will not try and make a huge issue out of my own, I did want to share some of Lee's ideas, and maybe after this piece, I can get back to writing about the incredibly important information that I post on "The Rooster Roast."

For me, writer's block is synonymous with indigestion. It is like eating a lot and then feeling as though you have to relieve yourself, only to find that your goods are in your chest cavity instead of where they need to be. It is frustrating and uncomfortable, because it eliminates any possibility of being productive, active, and to your highest level of functioning. Instead of equating words to poop and having a whole blog post about toilet imagery, I think that it is instead worthwhile to consider and then build with Lee's idea that words are the, "resources of the verbal imagination." When the imagination starts impinging on itself, when ideas start building up for their own sake instead of the sake of practical application, it is this circularity that results in the writer's block. Everyone can relate to the feeling of being locked into a daily routine. Sure, it is great to have that order and stability in your life; it might even be said that the routine becomes a kind of meditation, and that we start forgetting about the banality of it all. But what happens when, in the midst of your daily repetition, you become suddenly and surprisingly conscious of just how mundane your life really seems. This trope is huge in modern culture, and it is also really fun to play with. Take Office Space, for example. Out of the mundane comes the magical, and the magical runs amok for the worst: the catharsis comes when we realize that living with the mundane is the price to pay for living in an orderly world.



But speaking of "world," just who's world is it? When this question starts running through a person's head, it usually eggs him on to tease the opposite way of living (for the routine man, he starts drifting towards a more chaotic lifestyle; for the chaotic man, he starts drifting towards death). Taking such forces as "chaos" and "order" into one's own hands is dangerous, and luckily we have writing to refer to that can help bring us back to where we need to be. Lee says that, "[Discovering] that you are mute in the midst of all the riches of a language is a weird experience," and I think that this is where the man of mundane routine needs to put himself if he starts considering questions like the one above. When we are mute, we assume the role of observer and it is only from the role of observation that our "reset" buttons can be pressed and our rational thinking resumed; our imaginations, "must come home."

So anyways, hopefully writings such as this do not only serve as psychotherapy for the writer, but also as a way of exercising the thinking of you, the reader. We think about what we know, and whenever we plummet into that which we will never know, I guess we need people with writers block to write about how maybe words are like poop and reading like a conversation with oneself, re-orienting and replacing the mind into the frame that it needs to be. Either way, writer's block, like ruts associated with any other activity, is just another wall in the mind to be jumped. It's good to exercise jumping higher.