When Writing Becomes a Flaccid Penis
The Ecstasy and Idiocy of Creative Inspiration
When the good thoughts come—the exquisite, luminous ones worth keeping, the ones worth sharing—they come too fast. So rapid and in such an epically beautiful, hot mess of an avalanche that the only logical response is to give up rather than write them down. To sit there just thinking them, savoring having them at all: these brilliant epiphanies and illuminating insights.
Sit and let them wash over me while maybe scratching a patch of eczema on my leg. Perhaps staring at the textured landscape of a wall while, somewhere inside me, I’m watching the best movie ever made.
The feeling of thinking becomes enormous. I grow too big for myself. Something inside me is trying to escape the container of my body, and my skin feels impossibly thin, like the smallest membrane separating me from everything.
Too flimsy to contain this swelling, this cresting, this cocaine-like high of expansive revelations. I almost feel myself lifting, levitating, vertiginous. I need to hurl myself from a cliff like a lemming from all this spilling over and spilling out. It is the closest thing I’ve ever known to ecstasy. To the brief, terrifying sensation that I have finally arrived somewhere.
I could die then. Actually, I’d prefer it. Someone simply switches off the light. First: brightness. Then: nothing. A delicious nonbeing. All this instead of actually opening my laptop. Because the tragedy is that I want to explain this. I want to build a bridge from inside my head to inside someone else’s head and have them stand there with me for a moment.
I want someone to read my words and think: Yes. Exactly this. But I can’t. The moment I reach for the experience, it collapses. The air leaves the room. The room itself becomes strange—deflated like a birthday party balloon or a flaccid penis I need to flee. And then I sink.
The ephemeral ecstasy becomes an exercise in utter futility. Because I cannot write the way I want to write. I want to create that impossible recognition: the feeling that someone else has reached into your own mind and pulled out a thought you didn’t know you had. I want the reader to think: I could have written this. Except they didn’t. I did!
Unfortunately, this never seems to happen.
Because:
See above.
well shit.
dear Sylvie,
that hot, rising pressure you describe ... the thoughts coming too fast and too bright, like Gulf‑coast lightning bugs swarming a porch light ... that moment when the membrane between you and the world goes thin as rice paper. inspiration hits and suddenly you’re levitating in your own damn living room, scratching eczema and watching the best movie ever made play behind your eyes.
and then you reach for it ... try to drag one shining thought into daylight ... and it collapses. goes soft. goes flaccid. the room deflates like a birthday balloon found the morning after. I laughed at that line, but I felt the ache under it too.
here’s the thing: that ecstasy you’re talking about, that cresting, that too‑much‑for‑the‑body swell ... that’s the real writing. even when it never makes it to the page. even when it dies the second you touch it. the idiocy is part of the magick. the idiocy is the offering.
you make me feel like I’m standing right there with you in that thin‑skinned moment, watching the thoughts flare and vanish. and somehow, even in the collapse, you still manage to hand me a piece of it. that’s the trick. that’s the art.
nice
Steve