Still Sundays

October 31st.

I submit “Kafka” in my defense. The Prague in us all. Art is not spelled E-G-O.

I know many are expecting this piece to be either about Budapest (where I am right now) or Prague (which calls me back) but I apologize in advance: it is not quite about either. While traveling there exists a cognitive dissonance and I am just floating in the experience instead of writing about it. I will write more about Prague, but not now.

If you would like to know what Still Sundays is about, please take a quick gander here and just read the third paragraph. Thanks.

What can I offer about Prague that hasn’t been written and written very well?

John Keats wrote, “Beauty is truth and truth beauty.” Well, truth is often painful. Prague is that full-of-pain beauty. It holds many agonizing truths like ghosts we can’t quite see but surely feel. Even two decades later, the past is quite present. The past hasn’t been nice. The future is uncertain. The past endured is an open-wound in many ways. Yet she is glorious, mysterious, charming, and holds “another-world” beauty.

Somewhere I read, “Mystery is an abyss whose terrible depths entice our restless curiosity.”

Prague is that mystery and she is also the abyss. We are the mystery  and our past an abyss from which we are constantly swimming upstream.

It is a breathtakingly beautiful city: a stunning woman who silently weeps the losses endured.

We are beautiful despite our past.

It’s happening.

Again.

I want to shut-lock, seal-bond, clasp-bolt the geyser within from which the tall column of stories bursts into air.

Not because it is hard. It is. Not because it is hard work. It is. Not because I have the so called “writer’s block.” I have no idea what the hell that is. I wish I did so I could relate more with others but I don’t. My insides have been bursting at the seams with stories ever since I could first take account of the world around me.

Franz Kafka wrote about his writing in 1912:

“It is easy to recognize a concentration in me of all my forces on writing […] Naturally, I did not find this purpose independently and consciously, it found itself […] I need only throw my work in the office out of this complex in order to begin my real life.”

In July of 2009 I would have hailed the aforementioned words when I decided everything must and will revolve around writing. I had no idea what that meant. My Tuesday’s stories and this “Still Sundays” were not planned. Every story is intentional but I have never had a bigger agenda nor did I expect to continue for over five months. The manuscript for Her Sizwe—no longer sure if that will be the title—I always envisioned published in one form or another, but still, no bigger purpose.

I am on the edge of a self-imposed deadline because I want my life back. The life where I would just complain about not having time to write, where I bought and read books about writer’s block, where I jotted notes without the knowledge that the discomfort I feel within is actually the stray sentences wanting to be juxtaposed into something complete.

I only had one story to tell. But it’s as if each story, when near completion, decides to whisper to the grapevine of Life, resurrecting other stories that I am responsible for sharing.

Stories want to be monuments not ghosts.

When you reach the point where I am: it is what it is, you have to do what you have to do. Desire to share with an audience is independent of the convulsion within that creates.

I am consciously considerate. I deeply empathize with pain. Yet I have no mercy—none—for the man or woman carrying the shield of “art” in any medium as an excuse for elitism of any kind.

I am dismissive and can be downright cruel as I spitfire acid laden words that burn through the chunkiest ego leaving another to think twice before ever again flaunting airs of self-absorbtion.

I mock attachment to ego-driven identities that have no room for the chair called creativity which is already wobbly to seat oneself comfortably.

If you actually went where one needs to go to create, you would never put on airs of superiority. You couldn’t. Creativity that moves demands absorbing the world into your world.

Someone told me they have to be in the “mood” for “your type of writing”—my type of writing. I don’t know what is “my” type of writing.

In the words of Nina Simone: do I move you?

Good.

Dance with me.

You are not in the “mood” to move or be moved?

Let me know how that fares.

Life moves, earth moves, particles move. Living is in motion.

Art is the craft of engaging with life.

I write because it is my crusade against impermanence. Therefore, I must accept my love-hate relationship with this undertaking for moments are fleeting.

Kafka wrote, “In a fight between you and the world, back the world.”

Well, here I am: with my words I will back the world for there is beauty despite the pain.

It is 4:oo p.m. in Budapest and I must find my mother who has been patiently waiting for me to finish writing.

It is a Sunday that holds stillness of stones that stand the test of time.

If you are still long enough, you can’t doubt what you are meant to do.

~a.q.s.

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