When
you pick up your pen to write, what thoughts dance to the edge of your mind?
When you sit to think on paper, what ideas drive your muse? What devils you?
In
writing, a ransacking of the faculty is set in motion like the turning out of
pockets of a school kid would reveal what s/he’s been up to. It’s an adventure
into the still small things that run deep. Because a writer is the freak who would not let sleeping dogs
lie.
Sometimes,
a writer may present answers to nagging issues. But, much of the time, writers raise
dusts that are impossible to still. They are literary mischief-makers with a knack for exhuming best forgotten matters.
It is the writer’s business to guarantee the dust does not settle on a matter.
Writers
seemingly crave for knowledge that’s never theirs to attain. Desecrating
history’s sarcophagus like Time’s own
tomb raiders yet, trying their very best to be quiet about the whole subject
(as if that was possible). As time goes by, they become fairly successful at
keeping the peace like woodpeckers in a forest of silence boring deep circlets
into the trunk of century old trees. And in a manner similar to these species
of avian activities, always taking quick peeks between pecks, glances that were
they words could mean, ‘Am I disturbing
the peace, now?’ or ‘Am I prodding a
raw nerve, yet?’
I
don’t need to draw you a picture, do I? Writing is a gift. A blessing as well
as a curse. Not if you’re Sylvia Plath who predicted her own demise in her
poetry and effectively closed that chapter. Taking her own life.
Writing
is also savage pleasure. A trespassing if you like that word better. A mending
of broken links and a crossing of boundaries, unlocking of painful memories,
stripping it right down to its birth suit and taking heart-wrenching moments to
nibble at minutiae.
This
obsessive streak has a way of turning on the writer. Stephen King said he wrote
his novel, The Shining out of a personal
simple phobia that he might harm his own kids. (Owing to his state of mind at
that time.) Just because writers ain’t marching up and down blowing their own
whistle doesn’t make their job any less quiet than the last minutes of new year’s
eve.
The
pen is louder than the boom of a nuke on impact. What’s more, the scenes are reenacted
through all generations every time a reader cuts into the meat of the words. The
power at the fingertips of a writer pushes the lip of eternity. Chew on that
for a minute. And you might come to grasps with what could possibly be the
greatest power available to wo/men on earth.
Keep
your pen bleeding.
Akpan
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment
Feedbacks welcome and appreciated.