Wordsmithing

The words I search for taunt me from that impenetrable void where ideas originate. Incoherent fragments, indecipherable phrases, and confused and chaotic ramble assault my brain in waves like lemmings in their final rush to oblivion. I desperately scribble those disjointed, incoherent fragments in a vain attempt to devour them all like a frenzied addict on a self-destructive bender.

I just need another thought to finish this piece. Just one more fix and I can put it down…

Pages and pages of bibblings and scribblings lay scattered across my desk in a writers’ block inspired mass casualty event of literature. The red lines from endless edits slash across pages like cuts from a razor seeking an artery. Red ink pools puddle over the words and phrases as I feverishly negotiate like a crisis hotline operator with my inner muse to prevent the senseless suicide of another inspired idea.

My inner muse - the intoxicating, sadistic and unrestrained voice offering sweet words lubricated with a torrent of frustration, blood, and tears . She is the needy, bipolar succubus extracting the outpourings of my soul through a mess of conflicted emotions and jumbled words. Rarely does she speak directly to me. Rather, she chooses implication, innuendo, and vagaries of emotion from the fringes of comprehension. Sometimes she whispers to me directly, and her words galvanize into the most beautifully authentic, inspirited words. Mostly her words intentionally twist into an indecipherable confused, chaotic ramble. I sense a quiet sadistic joy from her when I struggle to comprehend her words and the fragile ego of a suicidal narcissist when my attention deviates from her. She is my vicious enabler, feeding my desperate addiction for ideas, but always for a measure of flesh and the mere entertainment of watching the struggle.

It is my Faustian bargain to this craft of wordsmithing. There is no twelve step program for treatment, only an ever more absurd, coquettish dance of seduction with wordplay.

She starves me to the point of exasperated capitulation then force feeds inspiration to my mind with the uncontrolled torrent of a storm surge. It is a seven-mile feast of unbridled inspiration, and I am a glutton starved for weeks. I gorge on her words until my brain fills to bursting, then I vomit all her words all over the page like a bulimic purging every last piece of food. What remains is a masterpiece of abstract beauty trapped inside an amalgamated polyglot of words.

It is the rough canvas of pure beauty, begging for release as Michelangelo did with sculpture from marble. The rough edges of this unfinished work are hypnotizing and captivating. It is a beautiful, incomplete disaster of crude, unrefined elegance – a damaged love child from a dysfunctional, codependent session of creativity. I see the artistry and the composition within the fragmented piece and begin the process of stripping the surplus, retooling the essential and refining the finished product.

This process becomes the embodiment of a parent’s endless task nurturing the natural gifts and beauty within their child.

Narcissistic jealousy fiercely grips my inner muse as I am absorbed with releasing the obscure beauty of our mongrel creation. First, my enabler coyly whispers her loose fragments of new ideas, in a vain attempt to steal my attention and control the power dynamic.

I continue to nurture my mongrel creation, undaunted…

Her words become more distinct, with an increasing vein of desperation. The aggressive , condescending edge ebbs like the sharp edge of blunt force trauma with time, and the fragile, suicidal narcissist returns. The indecipherable gibberish becomes more hurried, yet more distinct as desperation for acknowledgment replaces patronization.

Not now my love…

Her unbridled, narcissistic fury is released with an edge of inglorious passion. My brain is assaulted with a million disjointed fragments of preposterously transcendent and inspired ideas. Each fragment is a beautiful, unique, expendable hostage for my succubus to hurl at me with the scorn of an aggrieved lover. Her tantrum for attention is the tempest which storms through my mind, resolved only on scorched earth.

I turn towards her, and that addictive, frenzied insanity of inspirited creativity. It is the crazy that beguiles me.

Come to me my love and see what we have wrought…

The sharp edge to her piercing gaze softens as I beckon her towards our rudimentary creation. I guide her hands over each crevice between ideas, each rough cut of grammatical inadequacy, each pregnant pause of a preposition and each rambling run on sentence. A discordant harmony emerges between us from some long forgotten minor key in the canon of creativity. Somehow, we find that perfect flow as she begins to whisper her aspirations for our creation into my mind. From the polyglot of ideas, a cohesive, smooth and beautifully polished piece slowly emerges.

It is my bastard love child from my affair with my inner muse.

It is my Opus.