Writer's block.

Here in Kathmandu I bounce from room to room, one month here, one weekend there, another month somewhere else. This month, I am staying at Sattya, a media arts collective. They have poetry slams, they show documentaries on their rooftop cinema, and they have workshops in multimedia sorts of things, like photography and stop-motion animation. It's close to living the dream, staying here, except that I am an impostor. I don't do multimedia art. I used to play with 3D animations when I was a teenager, but it was my brother who had the flair, and the patience. In those days, we had talked about making an animated TV series, my brother and I. First it was going to be inspired by those things which we saw in our mind's eye: robots and castles and knights upon flying ostriches, you know. It was a wonderful abstract story, from what I remember. And then we talked about making Musashi, based on that book by Yoshikawa, the classic tale of self-mastery. I liked to make my brother's 3D creatures move, dance around, but whenever I found an obstacle that seemed unnecessarily difficult to overcome, of which there were so many in that program, I would give up. And then there was my brother, staring intensely into the computer. All of those little polygons, thousands of them joined together just so, I would see him day after day going through, finding the polygons that had gotten twisted up, untwisting them, tesselating them where necessary, zooming in in in, and then after a week of this I would see that he had made one... really... nice... hand. I am a performance artist with my foundation in circus training and puppetry, whose best work is always improvised, never to be seen again. I am someone who avoids taking photos because everyone else's photos are so much better. What am I doing in a multimedia arts collective?

Aah! It's all falling apart! What is that intangible thing that holds it all together? That glue beyond grammar and syntax? How does anyone even write anything? It has no purpose, it's just noise, noise in your head! Noise in my head which I translate into writing and then you read it and it becomes noise in your head! What is this thing, this so-called writing? It's not like I don't have anything to write about! Being in love with someone who is far away, being in a foreign country which is itself bound up in mystery, magic, and violence, living in a community arts collective, teaching circus to freakin' human-trafficking rescuees, for crying out loud! But these words, what do they do? Will they make me stronger, you wiser? No. Are they new, original? No - Yes, insofar as every moment and action is in someway unique - but no. I write and write, I have written so many things in here, what has come of it? I can feel my muscles tensing and untensing while I type. I am uncomfortable here, for some reason. Settling in, perhaps, or it could be to do with the fact that I'm not really able to settle, always moving on, chased off by the dogs of my own invention. I feel so out of place all the time! Triceps twitching, tired from pushups, from lifting people, spotting their backflips, in movement at least I feel comfortable, at home.

I just finished a great book, actually the transcript of a great lecture, called "The concept of home". In it the writer/speaker stated that having been a journalist for so many years has allowed her now to write without being precious. To paraphrase, she said something like "I believe in writer's block no more than I believe in hairdresser's block". One of my goals when I came back here was to write for at least one hour every day. An interesting challenge during load-shedding times, where the power cuts are currently up to 14-hours per day and rumoured to rise before the Winter's out. Writing with a pen, in the cold, by candle-light seems unnecessarily difficult when I can wait until a later time, sit in comfort, let words pour from ten fingers dancing, spider-like. Now I'm beginning to think I need to get a writing job to cure this sporadic writer's block. File or Fail. At any rate, it would be a funny story, writing for some magazine in Nepal, in English, for the bizarre ex-pat community (they look so formal, normal, they drink so much!). I have just heard that they are looking for writers at ECS, I might go and apply. The only problem is that I've already got too many jobs, each of which comes with its own impudent demands on my free-time: lesson-plan, do the stretches, write a god-damned report about the things I already said every week for five months! 

But, at least I have this good old blog, which perhaps 20-30 people read, some regularly, a cozy cabaret audience, enough people for me to try and craft each post into something vaguely noteworthy - vaguely coherent at least - but not too many that I have to worry too much about it. At one time I'd thought it would be lovely if I got heaps of followers, random comments from parking inspectors in Estonia, etc. but now I'm glad that no-one makes too much of a fuss. Thank you, dear readers, for reading these uncertain acts of word-arranging.