Stammerer's Psalm

There.


I finally did it.


Six times now, and counting.


I numbly regard my handiwork for a few barren, windswept minutes. Then the heavens burst.


Adrenaline permeates me like the breath of the Creator, and the suffocating opacity of my void shatters into a billion pirouetting gems of daylight.


The bay is a Tethys of liquid ecstasy.


I barely suppress the urge to genuflect, awestruck, before the sacred curiosity of a gregarious terrier. The Sistine canopy of the fig tree looming overhead echoes with a distant symphony of footfalls, rustling leaves, and romping youngsters.

Concrete is the world.

Breathing heat and sorcery, constellations of radiating hearts burn the numberless corpses of primordial microfauna. The celestial savannah is overrun by a teeming herd of suburbo-Guernican war pigs, weeping blood and ambrosia.

(Pain + Befuddlement + Jealousy) x Companionship
                                                      Insignificance*Symmetry
+ (Sex Eyebrows Prometheus)%
x Death < Destruction <= Injustice < Inconvenience
+
Love
Bells
Deformity
Bureaucracy
 = balletic electrons

Shit. It's all shit. And it melts my heart.

Every ballpoint murmur is an operatic scream of rapture. With a clumsily-cobbled platitude for a soul, I am born.

If you're still reading (that includes you, personalities #2 and #23 - #15, put that chainsaw down!), I'd like to clarify that the above paragraphs were not intended to be, and should not be mistaken for, fractionally-decent creative writing. If you've read even one sentence of a good book today, reading this garbage afterwards must be a bit like like getting a wink from Rachel Burr, followed by a thirty-minute flatulent lap dance from Kathy Bates (if you're into blokes, substitute with Taylor Lautner and Laurie Oakes respectively).

No, I'm simply venting; tossing a bucketload of cerebral effluent out into the smut-slicked streets of cyberspace.

Why? Because this is the first time I've written and finished anything remotely creative since 2005. My next-most-recent effort would have been in 2002.

As you can imagine, vitalising my arid, yearning notebook with a surging monsoon of impetuous creativity must make sex feel like old hat. If only that were the case. I penned the first word of this would-be-spontaneous journal entry on the 5th of September. At the time of writing, it has taken seventy days and two expensive writing courses for me to resist my internal Kyle Sandilands and his baying hordes of mundane distractions (their sinister alliance is self-evident) for long enough to sputter out a page of text. The drought is broken, but the rains fall in slow-motion while the soil is ravaged beneath them.

Writer's block is not anxiety or insecurity. It is holy terror. Literature, scholarship and journalism are but three harmonically reticulate, incomprehensibly majestic strains in the arts' unending hymn of praise, borne across the cathedral of the ages by the psychically resonant voices of the saints of the pen. To utter a single inelegant word; to clumsily appropriate a sanctified one; to speak with a voice that is not steeped with pious enlightenment; to elicit anything other than passionate adulation from the congregation - each feels like a mortal sin, a depraved blasphemy against the dominion of truth and clarity.

Thou shalt not bear false witness.

I have been gripped by this fear for my all-too-mortal writer's soul for most of the past eight years. But with every minute spent quaking in the cloister, desperately beseeching my shrivelled, over-taxed brain to send the wisdom of the ancients coursing from my fingertips into papery eternity, I was in fact damning myself to silence - the most desolate of all the hells on this earth.

A single note may be feeble, crude, oblique, or simply unremarkable; and even if it is sounded passionately and expressively, it cannot reveal all the secrets of the universe in and of itself. Complementarity is the rationale of all composition. It is only on the wings of harmony that a melody can soar; only in polysemy that the truth can be heard.

So I will raise my voice, and bray my grotesque, farcical psalms as a demented tribute to the magna opera. My words will be inaudible to all but the sharpest of ears, and asinine to all but those most fascinated by lionskins; but by simply releasing my thoughts into the Abzu of human discourse, I touch, for a fleeting instant, the face of God. 


©Benjamin Peter Carter, 13/11/2010

Yes, I love The West Wing.