There is no satisfactory excuse for the great paucity of material populating this blog of late, but mercifully society does not require one of me. Indolence, idiocy and incompetence can all be adduced, and I do enjoy bearing these overlooked virtues, but I feel something else has been at work.
I have borne the suspicion for some time that I am becoming - have become, have always been, the distinction is trivial - immensely boring. Thought to me has been an art precluded for some time. There are two possible causes in my mind; first, that my surroundings, so fresh and gross two years ago with the novelty of university education, have been analysed and considered to such an extent that they no longer stimulate me (indeed, they stimulated me little to begin with); second, there is the more invidious possibility that this is it - I had a brief period of mental fecundity and now I am to endure a slow descent into inescapable dullness. Of course, I most dread the latter, the path most conducive to the prospect of future employment.
An ancillary pain in the arse is the effect this has on my writing - most notably, the absolute destruction of it. It is to be expected that one might have difficulty expressing one's thoughts when one has none to express, after all. This is the first piece of prose I have written in half a year, exempting numerous university essays, in which one's ability to feign interest is examined rigorously. Oddly, however, my ability to write (poor) poetry has remained undefiled.
Of course, this is probably due to the disparate natures of prose and poetry - the former requiring a fairly ordered, sustained stream of thought and the latter requiring an intense burst of verbal facility which transcends all else. Additionally, prose tends to be more governed by that beast rationality, whereas poetry tends to be more governed by emotion. It is only natural to assume that the ability to experience emotion is less affected by a terrible cessation in mental activity. Accordingly, there are great moments in which the ice is riven apart, usurped by its own weight, and something can be fished from out the depths. The fact that these scribblings are so much worse than those which I would choose to read willingly is a necessary part of the thrill at present. But then, if I were to look on anything I'd written and think, 'That's brilliant,' then the quest would probably be over. I think the point is to inherently despise one's output, thereby somehow constructing a bizarre paradox under which one is tricked into writing better (though this technique probably does assume a pre-existing masochism on the part of the writer).
I'm coming to the point now where I'm considering self-publishing these poems on Kindle or whatever blasted platform predominates at the time. I have the constant urge to document my thoughts before I am completely subsumed by illiteracy. As I've mentioned, however, poetry is quite different from prose, and I'm unsure of my views towards allowing others to read it. The prime motivation is preservation rather than communication, and I don't particularly expect any of it to be read. The excessive neuroticism which inheres to the poems is also quite a worry - I've essentially emulated the Romantic poets, whilst renouncing the vestiges of academia and amplifying the despair and anxiety. The end result is something quite bizarre, I fear.
Yet is this not the purpose of poetry and, more generally, writing itself? For those, like me perhaps, who suffer from a tremendous fickleness of thought, writing is one of the few viable modes of self-actualisation. In this quite simple sense it is the pillar which buttresses the awkward, anxious character. I have always found it perfectly impossible to marshal my thoughts in conversation, because a great deal of my faculties are perforce devoted to wrestling an immense self-awareness, and the production of a countervailing but entirely false aloofness. This problem is not present in writing because the audience is intangible and abstract and, furthermore, I am sheltered from its disgusted reactions to my nonsensical asseverations. It is with this nebulous audience in mind that I even consider the possibility of publishing poetry.
Lastly, there is the more general problem of the feculent nature of the poems concerned. Indeed, the word 'poetry' is probably a misnomer in this case. I have the dilemma - do I publish them now, in ignorance of their resounding dullness? Do I wait some years, in the hope that my scant powers have improved? Do I abandon the enterprise altogether? Something grossly arrogant can be perceived in taking the effort to publish anything, but this is not the spirit in which I apprehend the task. If I do eventually unleash my monstrosities, it will be in the knowledge that I am committing some great crime against good taste. But it will, as I have explained, assist in the expression and preservation of my increasingly dull personality, and to this end it may be a necessary evil.
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