59. Expense accounts

The crayons in your hands. Pretending to write. Or with colored chalk on the asphalt, drawing unintelligible, but pretty signs in neat rows as if leaving a note behind for nonchalant passers-by. You don’t sketch faces, objects. A flower, a fish, maybe a butterfly. You play at scribbling words.

Probably confused by the sight of unalike graphic languages, you compromise, outlining various simulacra of the alphabet adding exploded lines reminding the reader of Chinese characters. An osmosis of visual symbols, merging antipodes in your self-confident gestures. Finding no difficulty in inventing a way to unite the approaches of sounds and images into an outlandish written effort at communication.

I write too. And as I watch you have fun with make-believe sentences, I wonder about my own fiction.

Perhaps because I’m much older than you, I don’t possess the spontaneity you display with your writing tools. I find writing difficult. To be honest, I associate the act with a hard-to-endure form of sacrifice. As I select a word, I become acutely aware of all the others that are being excluded on account of this halt, the decisive moment when writing reflects the stop put to a search and its movements. A choice escorted by sadness. A discerning intuition about what is suddenly left out.

Conscious also that by opting for a language, I discard the possibilities carried by others. The rhythm of syllables in English shut out the resonance a thought might have in French or Mandarin. A voice that precludes other sounds. The idea now limited to one set of phonemes, the musicality bounded, evolving in the restricted area of a single grammar.

So this is what I like about writing: What comes before. Envisioning infinity. The silence as nothing yet is fixed. The waiting period, filled with alternatives. All of them available, interchangeable, frolicking with nuances and harmonic overtones. Slight connotations and variations. Gliding from one meaning to another, everything in that instant utterly feasible.

The minute a verb appears on the screen, it’s all finished. The vast spaces full of promises a moment ago shrink abruptly, now circumscribed to a few vowels and consonants, leaving out the other manners with which an idea could have been conveyed. Thoughts strangled, cemented. Incomplete without their variations, extensions belonging to their potentiality.

The typed word becomes a dry, lifeless choice. Disconnected from the tentacles of other expressions that once gave it the faculty to move and grow at an exponential rate.

I therefore always find what I write riveted, anchored. No longer able to envision the prodigious oceans intention came from. Writing as the narrowing of possible courses of actions. Picking just one. Sacrificing the lot to an isolationist decision. Filled with regrets for what remains unachieved.

It is what has not been said that stays interesting. The ways it could have been articulated. While unused alterations with their multifaceted substances drown fast into unexplored territories. Every time I write, I settle. And except for tiny pieces here and there, I disavow the maximum.

I know the unwritten as the place I’m not heading for. Turning my back. Landing unto the specific, thus eliminating the general and its wealth of undeveloped promises.

A writer in fact who doesn’t like written words. Have you ever heard of that? Somebody who thinks they’re never enough, torrents suspended, unattended to, fixated in forms so much smaller than those that were an instant ago abandoned. Expressiveness constantly elsewhere the minute lines appear on the white background. Blocking the light. Darkening the monitor. An entire translucence jeopardized. The implicit reduced to a few inferences. Heavy toll for a single chosen word.

Obviously not accepting so well that elements are privileged while others are not. Unease, the burden of choice. Finding unfair to name favorites. The amplitude of significance ostracized. Sorrow when sizing up repudiated vocabulary, combinations from now on deprived of a lifestyle.

Indeed for me, writing in essence is about annihilating, putting an end to revolving blends. Hereafter untold. Absent from the text.

So it can be a tragedy. That of what must be forgotten. Relegated to soundlessness. Butchering polyphony.

It is, it has already been explained, in the total moment of silence, when the conductor lifts his arm, when all the musicians are ready, the orchestra stoic, that all that is possible can exist. In the few seconds of instrumental muteness that the immense qualities of symphonies can expand beyond our limitations. It is in a withdrawn stillness that the words can reverberate their infinite depth. When the cadenza of possible pronunciations is still in a state of immeasurability, of endlessness, that all that can be written is alive. The untiring coalescence of phrases that have not yet been traced.

In the heartbeat before a word is laid down, there’s a universe of possibilities. And it is that very moment that I love. Whenever I claim a choice, I thoroughly feel the destruction it implies, an aftertaste of desolation ruining forethought. Obstructing the rest. The writer agonizing, forced to weight the losses. And accused.

I envy your fantasies. The invented words you draw on the sidewalk. Because they do not slaughter potential meaning. They do not have to renounce anything. Unaware of the need to immolate letters for the sake of a few written ones. Signs foreign to decisions. Simply flowing without having wiped out the world they originated in. Your illusive lexicon unfolding, never detrimental, not concealing a multitude of rejected arrangements and items. The marriage of sounds without exceptions or reservations still intact. Unconsumed. Yet wholly viable as long as there are no marked commitments. No favored term to invalidate the macrocosm containing all the odds. Your little hand able to render inexhaustible interpretations, leaving none stranded, no damage spotted in your tracks, no embodiments left behind in the path of writing. Not a soul forsaken. Just a game and no cost.

For years, I didn’t write. Now you know what it was I could not afford.

Laolao