Poem about the unwritten life

 

I know two women who own many journals: beautiful bas-relief leather-covered books filled with cream-toned artisanal paper. Lined and unlined sheets, thick and handsome, gems in miniature, “100-Day Goal Journal,” “Jane-a-Day 5 Year Journal,” “The Perfect Minimal­ist’s Journal,” dozens of them, costly or modest. There is not a word writ­ten in any of them. My father, in his seventies, told me he wanted to write stories. Yet he never typed on his word processor or put pen to paper. I blog psychology but have never conceived the stories or poems I’d entertain lame thoughts about. Border­line Person­ality-disordered women in their twenties, bring­ing their purple-inked calli­graphed jour­nals to sessions, tell me they want to be authors. I sus­pect there are thou­sands of women (probably men, too) who quietly accu­mulate these books, having had no inten­tion of becom­ing col­lec­tors of paper. Each acquisition came from an urge anew: This will be the time I write.

I would like to universalize about this feeling of wanting to be a writer, when it is a false desire. I think it’s simple. We want to be heard and have our thoughts strike people as impor­tant, ultimately important. We want the world to stop and listen to us. May­be liter­ally, though impossibly: The planet should cease rotating mindlessly, the people in their self-indul­gent rhythms should stop still, absolutely still, look up, all finally serious and galled, and know and value us. Our meaning, our self, would change their life.

Thoreau’s men who lead lives of quiet desperation are standing on an unquiet ocean, not solid ground with sturdy roots. This is because of their childhood, which is always their true identity. That is when feeling was all of meaning and it created thoughts as colorful as rainbows, as fulgent as lightning. Feelings, though, get buried, in childhood and adolescence. We end up with thoughts that are alien to our real self, smoke after a smothered fire, empty.

This is why we feel unfounded, ungrounded. We flail for meaning. Career? Money? Sex? Marriage? We hope to read our mysterious ocean, find our essence. And here we may want to write, which is both to find oneself and declare it. The problem is that words are not the feelings, our iden­tity, that got buried in our childhood. And be­cause only feeling moves the pen, we can’t write words. The journals pile up, untouched. They are where our future discovery lies, the lost, if only we knew what it was.

If only we knew what to say.