Before I left for Buenos Aires, I had something to say about everything, all the time. You couldn't shut me up, and when I wrote, a thousand words left my fingers in a moment, flowing unbidden and irrepressible.
Now that I really have something to say, I can barely speak.
I can talk around what I want to say. I can address peripheral issues. But I have a growing mountain of simple, obvious essays pounding in my brain that I just cannot write, because they are so simple, and so obvious.
I went to Argentina and all I came back with was an inability to connect with life from any place other than my total soul.
Not so great for writing! Even though now I finally have The Book, the thing I am here to say. It's easy to put mental observations into words. But now that I feel that my Soul Switch is stuck in the “on” position, I struggle to verbalize the slow, acerebral, painfully sincere voice of my heart. I'm in labor with a sentence for an hour before it comes out. I struggle and struggle and struggle, and then in the end put the essays away, frustrated, unable to say what I'm trying to say.
Even right now, I write about the closing down of my brain, rather than the opening up of my soul.
Because you can't write a soul. You can't capture the blood of life in words on paper, any more than you can paint a sky that truly shows the electric energy of light in the air. It can't be done.
You can, however, spend the rest of your life trying.
"Wake! For the Sun, who scatter'd into flight
The Stars before him from the Field of Night,
Drives Night along with them from Heav'n, and strikes
The Sultan's Turret with a Shaft of Light. "
—The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, 1 - 4