Baby Steps

It's always the second act that gives one pause, a pause that all too often becomes a grinding to a full-on halt. This is my way of acknowledging that yet again I took an unexplained, probably unearned, certainly uninteresting break from this, my essential outlet and yet my bete noire too. And that yesterday, in honor of my father, my most vigilant reader, I returned, like the fog, on "little cat feet," and that tonight I find myself, as I have so many times over the last however many nights, sitting at my desk thinking: Why am I doing this again? What on earth could I possibly have to say?

I just took a long break and pretended for a while I was not going to make myself keep writing, but all along I knew that I would. I always know when I am going to do something and when I am not, which seems to be a useless gift, as so often the things I know I am going to do are wholly unimportant, and the things I know I am not going to do are the things that must get done. And besides, we all know that at heart, I do believe I have a lot to say, and will keep saying it, even if I occasionally wander off into a void for a period, a void filled with small child obligations, vaccinations against already mutated viruses and some really atrocious TV.

One reason I started this blog was to have a place where I would be able to work through pieces intended for publication, and I have been stalling quite impressively, and I am quite a staller on my worst days, on writing so much as a line. So I think I will start here, and perhaps work it through in this capacity, as the bad TV is not proving conducive to productivity.

What I am working on, in my head, anyway, is a sort of a manifesto, inspired, in part, by Orwell's brilliant "Why I Write;" it will be called: Why I Read. I am both in love with my as yet nonexistent manifesto (always a bad sign) and overwhelmed by it, even in concept. I have been asked to write a piece for which this essay would suit, so it is, therefore, one of those things I must do, but as explained above, that fact alone is a speck of dust trapped in a light shaft: nothing, or very little more.

Pondering why I read, I guess would be, in the words of the immortal Maria, "a very good place to start." Except there is no pondering, really; I have mostly thought this through. I read because there have been more moments in my life consumed by reading than by any other thing, and because so many of these moments have made me aware, either consciously or subconsciously (which I realize later), that there is a reason for my existence on this earth--to read the words I am reading in that moment, and in the other moments, too.

Although it is neither the first nor the best example that comes to mind, I remember reading these lines from Orwell's essay entitled "Reflections on Gandhi." Such an innocuous little throw-away of a title; such a knife plunged into the clueless heart of what people had thought before Orwell raised the knife. He wrote: No doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid. Not the most devastating or reprinted line in the essay, but the one that, when I read it, stopped my breath in my chest, made me then read almost everything else the man had ever written.

It is the last part, the part about sainthood, that makes me want to raise that knife skyward, letting the blood flow off it and around my feet. Had faint praise ever damned so much as when Orwell referred to Gandhi's "clean smell?" Gandhi, to get back to the "Why I Write" essay, wrote because of his political beliefs, but his political beliefs were his muscles and organs and bones; they were him, boiled down to who he actually was. I read because it makes me know Orwell, and I read because it makes me know almost everything I know, including how to live, and think. Reading is the only way I know to connect myself to every mind that ever wrote, every idea that has ever been written, every picture that has ever been painted, and more: to all the thoughts that haven't yet been written down in words. I read because to read is everything.

See? Working it through. Bear with me!