Why I write…

Let’s face it. I’m not particularly fond of hanging myself out for the world to see. I am the analyst, not the analyzed. I prefer my dark, warm study, wherein I can ponder for hours upon the evils of the world. However, the question is: If I’m so much of a recluse, why do I blog? The answer to the question lies somewhere in a dark, deep-rooted desire, to transition from my voluntarily assumed position of king-maker, to the precarious perch of the monarch himself. Why do I write incessantly, about topics that bore me to death, yielding wasted words and insipid alliteration?

Because, I believe life is unlike physics. Life isn’t linear, life isn’t logical, and it’s certainly not fair. To break my obsession with perfection, I must commit imperfect deeds. Innumerable times I have initiated a new activity, in feverish earnest, only to abandon it shortly. The past has stood witness to many incidents where I did not perform as expected, abandoning the project, and leaning on the crutch of a “perfectionist”. It is better to expend effort and fail, than to ponder over the supposed inefficiency of action, and abandon the task before initiation. It’s sickening. It’s like an affliction. You keep pondering and thinking and considering and evaluating and analyzing. You settle down into your dust, and become a recess for sloth, procrastination, laziness, and all things inert. You stagnate, crumble, rot, disintegrate. I was well along that path. Certain events in my life had were subtly pushing me darker into the mire. A loss in concentration, ambition, and overall desire of well-being. My personal appearance started dwindling. The glow of a healthy aura, the shine of a good spirit were fading away. The emotional, physical and spiritual peak I had attained last summer, while on that little ship, were almost gone. And you may ask, how this bear upon the blog. The blog represents a gradual shift. I must force action and concede inertia. In my life, there has seldom been sustained interest in anything. I have gone through short-lived obsessions with guns, guitars, violins, pianos, cars, health and fitness, women, money, sport, spiritual orientation and many others. I have been the stereotypical child, biking through the city for mindless hours. I have been the shy recluse, reading constantly for 7-8 hours without pause, devouring tomes of children’s classics, old masters, trashy fiction, commercial erotica grade page turners, and legal pages alike. I have been the crazy athlete, jumping roofs, running in the rain, playing football for hours. I have been everything and more. If a being is vastly affected by everything around him, is he insane, or divinely-calibrated??? What does my habit of using descriptive words and oft archaic expression reflect on a psychological scale? During a brief period, the troubled years of 13 to 16, I have waxed intensely philosophical, profoundly influenced by that great power that is Khalil Gibran.

There. My wandering persona has drifted again. I have veered off my original objective, the reason why I write. I write for the sake of writing. I write because I feel a need to write. Since childhood, when I was old enough to formulate sentences in my head, in periods of intense anguish or happiness, the events before me, have been transcribed in my thoughts into the third person. When I was denied a particularly exquisite chocolate cake, the words drifted into my head,” He gazed at the sight before him, the cake that was the culmination of all his life’s desires.” I believe that the reason I write is because I feel grander, I feel larger and more elevated than what I am. My words can paint self-portraits for me, like no artist ever can. Any person reading this might naturally concur an unhealthy self-obsession in me. However, to me, the obsession with self-analysis and aggrandizement is justified. As God made man in his own image, to understand myself, would be to hear whispers from the mind of God. I am the civilization. Within me are all the great deeds and sins, all the battles and wars ever fought, all the success and follies ever found. I am the Everyman, and so is everyone on this Earth. I represent mankind in all its totality. Therefore, to unravel the mysteries of my mind would be to unravel the mysteries of life. I represent the countless generations that came before me. However, I am not content with merely passing on the torch. I must use the gift of the Torch to spread light and light fires where there is darkness, damp and moisture. I write, because maybe, it shall help me evolve into that which I must be. Even on a baser scale, I can say; I write because I must. The time for change is now. Things shall never be better for me than right now. The plants are rightly aligned, or perchance the gods look down in a brief moment of benevolence. I believe that I should not need to explain why I write. Someone once said that success occurs when an accident meets a prepared mind. I am preparing my mind. There are indications, like the one I am currently writing, that suggest that these “accidents” shall be spiritual and philosophical in nature. I cannot help but link my thoughts to those of the legends of yore, the poets of our times. I refer to the Lawrences, the Emily Jane Brontës, the Wilfred Owens and countless others of our times. I do not profess intimacy with these poets. At most, I have had a brief conversation of only a few words with them. But in those few words, they have conveyed the ripples that have echoed through man’s mind since time immemorial. I do not aspire to their fame. However, I yearn for their gift, and I crave to be able to dip into the pool of humanity and bring forth thoughts that strike all of us in a subtle, but sudden way. Hence, I write…

~ by aecoss on December 15, 2006.

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