Writer's block: Grasping the void
I seem to be in some strange sort of mood lately. I cannot write film reviews as before. No, nothing serious like a brain damage or something, but I smell a sense of loss all over me. I ask friends to quantify, analyze and interpret my condition, but I guess I can only say that the best judge of my condition is myself. Yes, I am having one of those severe mental blockages a film writer must have encountered once in while in their writing careers. I was sitting pretty much inside my newly rented condominium half-way between Metro Manila and Quezon City when I realized that it has been months since I wrote nonstop here at my blog. I wonder why this persistence to cinema writing and the intensity of it has gone aloof, adrift towards unknown shores. I blame the many days and nights that have passed without any plans, any schedules. I blame the countless minutes I should have spent writing profusely about my thoughts on the nature of cinema. I blame the emotional distress caused by the three men that walked passed by me. The long sighs that should have been dedicated to finalizing the FILM DECONSTRUCTED series, or finishing my 2010 countdown, the latter overdue for months now. I blame Facebook for consuming my time. I blame my immersions to the local film culture (attending so much of the many, many scheduled film events around the metro is exhausting and exhilarating). I blame the countless nights I slept in motels, the meet-ups with random strangers over coffee or sex, or even the strenuous after-sex talks that went on and on for ages. The significant weight bearing down on my shoulder was alarming, as one reflexologist told me over a session here at my condo, he said: "You carry too much weight on your back sir. Your muscles seems tense and compacted." I replied: "Must have been the months of non-stop exploration of who I am."
It was as if a large wool of sheet was unveiled to me last night when, upon gazing at myself in the mirror, I encountered a sense intolerance to the track I am building myself upon. People say, you are allowed to fuck up at twenty-one: marry a pig, have dozens of kids or something, punch the air in victorious cry to air that you've survived fucking yourself up, I don't know if I'm up to that. Or that this phase is considerable enough at some point, and one must completely stop when in doubt about the circumstances.
You arrive at the moment when you realized, at twenty-one, yes, you are allowed to fuck up and sin, to date and marry pigs, to live in the fast lane, to sing karaoke at 4AM, and to lust at so many well-mannered, well-cultured, bourgeois twenty-one-year-olds that could've been you. I find myself a rebel for months, figuring the many intensity of Manila and its soul, the transitory spaces, the emotional resonance I've been longing for years, above all, the freedom to live on my own, at twenty-one.
Yet at twenty-one, I could've achieve much: to graduate with superlative honors from the university, to be enlisted in an Ivy League school abroad for a Master's Program, to finish and publish many, many film articles for journals, to become the well-mannered, well-culture, bourgeois twenty-one year old man I used to lust at midnight on a browsing spree in the internet.
I realize one thing about self-satisfaction and my effort to stipulate my existence around it. I tell you, its exhausting to build oneself around that goal, and to masturbate at it believing that it will come a point that you'd have the greatest orgasm in your life. In fact, one wastes ones life around it. It spreads discontent like a smack of excrement on your face. It's a severe mindfuck.
Is there a way back to life-writing, to cinema-writing, to novel-writing? Where does one start collecting the pieces?
Is there a way back to life-writing, to cinema-writing, to novel-writing? Where does one start collecting the pieces?
Frankly, I figure out, to launch myself back into the intensity of writing, I have to re-channel all my efforts to reading. Yes, some say voracious reading can intensify writing. It heals the disjointed focus one has accrue from descent into ordinary life. The question is, am I willing to go back again? Is there a place where I can land my ass and softly work my way up again? This is a question to commitment, to devotion to one's career. What a joke: I have a career. It mingles with fear, expectations and trepidation of the improbable.
I have to fall in love again.
Ciao!
****
