THE WRITING WARRIOR

The adjective that best describes the Private House is the word ‘free.’ Here is another word that is very important to us human beings. To be free from bondage of any sort, to do and speak as we are compelled, to be at physical, mental and spiritual liberty, has been and continues to be our struggle and our desire. The words ‘free,’ ‘love,’ ‘peace,’ ‘precious,’ ‘safe’ all come from the same root, the Indo-European, pri. And add ‘dom’ to the double vowel in the open syllable, unchecked by a consonant, and the word booms and reverberates like a drum, a primitive, primordial drum expressing with its timbres and rhythms the beat of the irrepressible human heart: a drum made of the wood of the Tree of the World, perched on the branches of which birds sing, and louder sing than doubt.

An unconditional, fearless freedom is the primary condition, the very ground of creativity. “Without freedom, no art,” says Albert Camus. Freedom is the very soil without which no seed of truth and beauty sprouts and grows. If, for any reason whatsoever, we shackle our thoughts, tie up our tongues, put chains around our hearts, imprison our imaginations, repress words, and take away from ourselves the freedom to write however, whatever, we will never develop our voice.  Voice and freedom are inextricably connected, and in order to develop our voice we have to take the freedom, initially, to sing badly rather than not at all.

This freedom, which we are naturally heirs to, is easily threatened. The threat is both external and internal. Externally, we are judged by teachers, critics, our peers, magazine editors, judges of contests, editors at publishing houses, parents, etc. Anybody who doesn’t support or like our writing functions as a policeman of our talents, tonguecuffs us, and throws us into the prison of wordlessness.

The internal threat is not any the less serious for being self-created. Even when the external threat is lacking, we judge ourselves, dis-empower ourselves by our own negative self-talk, lack trust in our selves, and blight our songs by our doubts. Of all human perversities, the most amazing is the manner in which we ourselves are our own worst enslavers and silencers.

If you are one of those people who have ‘got to have to write,’ you have no choice but to wrest your freedom from all that threatens it, retreat to your private fortress, and get into the habit of giving yourself the freedom that nobody else is going to bestow on you.  This freedom has to be fought for and maintained with unrelenting vigilance. Writing is dependent upon a confidence, a chutzpah that you have to develop on your own. Naked and fearless inside this fortress, in this secret place, this high place of safety, you will need to practice to sing louder than your external and internal critics, to write what you please, doodle, babble, erase, keep. Nobody, absolutely nobody, can take this away from you if you don’t want them to. The Private House is your singing field, your grazing ground where you let the unsaddled, unharnessed horses of your imagination roam unrestrained in the unchartered territory of your thoughts and feelings, where you go trustingly where your thoughts and words take you.

CHAPTER FIVE

DEFENDING YOUR TERRITORY

Help comes, if we are open to it, from unexpected sources. It was the Goddess of Vegetables who came to my rescue, and routed the block with tomatoes. For weeks and months the block had me in thrall. It was the dark hole around which I orbited endlessly. I couldn’t just say, ‘oh well, this is what is happening now, or not happening now,’ and leave it at that. I wasn’t wise enough to know that with patience and persistence it would inevitably pass, to enjoy the block, as it were, take blessed time off for all those ‘life’ activities that I so like, but rarely indulge in: leisurely mornings with P, staying in bed, discussing our dreams, or simply being in bed, silent, touching; unmeasured time at the breakfast table, reading the paper, he with his coffee, me with my chai, peeling fruit, making toast; walks on the beach, or sitting by the fire with the cats, reading. No, I am not smart enough, yet, to use my blocked time well. I belong to that race of people who feel the healthiest and the best when they are writing, which makes, of course, for much happiness and much misery, since writing must inevitably be preceded and followed by not writing, as sound, silence.

During the Big One, all I could do at home was crawl into bed, think about everything that was wrong with my life, and stew in the juices of my misery. No wisdom, no philosophy, came to rescue me from the intense rawness of my emotions. My life became dependent and conditional. I kept telling myself that I would deserve to live only if I could do this and this and this, and get that and that and that. Thoughts of suicide were beginning to enter my mind. The voice of failure was beginning to negate and erase me.

At this very point the Goddess called to me. I dragged myself to get out of bed to go buy groceries. In the grey parking lot, in the store, pouring over the cheeses to decide on one, I felt the knot in my stomach, the pain in the heart, the fumes in the head, the paralysis.

But something happened over by the vegetable counter. Holding the plastic bag in my hand, and feeling the tomatoes for ripeness, ‘too soft, too hard, just right, this will keep for a few days,’ a word floated into my mind, a totally irrelevant word that mobilized my moribund energies, infused me with courage, curdled the amorphous blobs of feeling in my heart into sense and nonsense, pointed a direction, and started my ascent up into light.

The word, not sweet in its sound or its sense, but nevertheless powerful in its effect, was:  enemy. The sentence it was embedded in was, ‘the voice that tells me I am no good is the voice of the enemy.’  

No sooner did the word and the thought come, than I shifted into the offensive mode, the warrior mode. I am a Sikh, you see. I come from a race of warriors, started by ten warriors who worshiped through word and song. They were singing warriors, men who loved peace, poetry and justice so much that when the Muslim leaders interfered with their right to be, to worship, to sing, they picked up arms to defend not only their own right but the rights of all people everywhere to sing and worship as they please.

At the heart of Sikhism is word, and song. Sikhs believe in the magical properties of word and name: “Naam,” they call it. The proper word at the right time conjures, dispels, empowers. In the material world, the word is truth, evoking the highest, God, if you will. Words, the names of things, are connected intimately with the things that they evoke. Though the Thing Itself remains beyond words, indescribable, words connect us to it. Words, mere sounds so potent that they can give birth to worlds, revive the dead. By remembering a word, a name, you can be rescued. It doesn’t matter what your name for that which rescues is: it could be Jehovah, Jesus, any of the hundred names of Allah, any of thousands of names of the Hindu gods. The name has the power to rescue and save you. This is what the Sikhs believe. They worship the word. They build temples to it. They sing the word, fight battles in its name.

And there is always need to do battle. A metaphoric war is no less of a war. The battlefield here, the battlefield of the gods, is the human head and heart. This is where we have to wage a daily, hourly war against the thoughts and the feelings that would defeat us, take away our territory, and our voice. Every time we defend ourselves, speak our opinion, speak our truth to our bosses, our spouses, our friends or neighbors, we are potentially drawing lines of war, establishing territory. To survive as a writer we have to wage war against the forces that would gag and silence us. In this battle for Voice we have to keep our symbolic swords handy. There is really no difference in this battle between the word and the sword. I have always found the spelling of these two words very interesting. ‘Sword’ contains ‘word’, and the sibilant, ‘S’.  ‘Sword’ contains a hissing sound, like the sound of a snake. Which brings me to a very relevant digression, and a wonderful story by Ramakrishna.

The Snake Who Lost His Hiss

The elders of a village went to the Saint where he was meditating in a cave in the mountains, and complained about Nagarajah, an evil snake that had terrorized the village.

“His hiss can be heard for miles around,” they said. “He bites and swallows our cattle, our dogs, our children, our men, our women. Even the bravest among us have become afraid to venture out into the fields which are dry, parched, uncultivated. Our granaries are depleted and empty. Our numbers are dwindling from death by the snake, and by starvation. Help us, Guru, you alone can subdue and vanquish him. ”

The Saint, realizing the gravity of the situation, descended to the village, and went to the  large, spreading bodhi tree. This used to be the tree under which children played, yogis meditated, and lovers lay in each other’s arms under the moonlight. But no more. Now at its coiling, twisted roots, the snake lived in his burrow.

“Come forth, O Ancient One,” the Saint called, and the snake crept out of his hole,  slithering and undulating, his scales shimmering in the sunlight. He was dark and shining in his majesty, awesome in his length and his beauty. He glided to the Guru, and coiled up meekly at his feet.

“Oi, what is this I hear about you being the scourge of the village? Leave your destructive ways. Be good. Don’t kill needlessly. Stop biting them. Leave them alone,” the Saint said.

Because the snake had good karma, because he could be made conscious of the consequences of his acts, and because he had the sense and the power to obey the Saint, he returned to his burrow, resolved henceforth to leave his evil ways, and be good.

The fields yielded grain, the children came out to play, the lovers loved, the brave came out with their bows and their arrows, and the villagers were once again at peace.

One day, several months later, the Saint passed by the tree in the village, and found the snake coiled near the root of the tree. He was utterly transformed. His scales had fallen off, he looked mangy, emaciated, innocuous, limp. He had sores all over his body. He looked like he was on the verge of death.

“Oi, what happened to you?” the Saint asked.

“This, O Guru, is the fruit of obedience, of being good. I obeyed you, I gave up my evil ways, I let the villagers alone, I stopped biting them, I stopped eating their livestock, and what happened? Look what they did to me. The children come and throw stones at me. Even the rats dance on my head. I haven’t eaten for months. I am simply waiting to be eaten when I die.”

“This is your own fault,” the Saint replied. “I told you not to bite them, but I didn’t tell you not to hiss.”

Okay. So hissing is very necessary. One needs to hiss in order to defend one’s space. We all have to keep our hiss. The words ‘enemy’ and ‘war’ mobilized my energies, got me hissing.

“Die?” I thought, with the tomato, like a grenade, in my hand, “Hell, no. I’m not defeated that easily. I will write about wanting to die.”  I cheered up almost immediately. “All of this will become fodder for the book. I will write a book for writers, such as myself, who are almost vanquished by The Block, by thoughts of being ‘failures.’ My feelings about not being a good writer will become the material for the book. Yes, one must find food to survive, and really, if one is cunning and resourceful, one can find food almost anywhere. If there is one thing a warrior does not do is succumb to despair. Enough, enough of this diffidence and fear. I will rout it. I will take out my sword, or rather my pen, and defeat it with words. I will tell my writing story, Mr. Death. I shall sing as I damn well know how. Babble and chirp to my heart’s content. I will write because I have ‘got to have to write.’  Nothing, absolutely nothing is going to keep me from it. Not the fear that I am not good enough, or skilled enough, or bright enough, or important enough. Not the fear that the book may never have an audience, never be published. Not the fear that I may never get my reward for my labors. I have already got the first reward for this book — the sabbatical. A whole year off to babble! They can’t revoke that . It’s not the kind of book they are paying me to write, but I won’t let anyone dictate to me the kind of book I should write. I’m the one that’s going to be putting in the labor and the time. I must benefit from the writing of it before anyone else can. The physician who heals himself can heal others. The guru who has traversed the path can guide others. My trek through the valley of death will familiarize me with the terrain so I can sketch a map of it for others. I will be ruthlessly honest. I will tell where I fell, where I was hopeless, and how and when I picked myself up and carried on. This will be a tale of how I became a Writing Warrior.”

Standing quietly in the midst of the vegetables and the fruit, I resolved to return to writing. Words are my vegetables, my tomatoes, my potatoes, my meat. They are my daily bread. They are my weapons to deal with my demons. They are my own, private fortress. I am the queen here. I will write it as I choose to write it. I will make it subjective and objective, move freely between objectivity and subjectivity, between expository and narrative. So, I don’t want to write about blocks in general, I want to write about blocks in particular: mine. I want to get personal and dirty. I don’t want to be safe. I want to get into the muck of this business. I want to tell the truth as I see it, even if it means risking judgment. I will tell my writing story. I won’t think too much about what I want to say, but just kind of sit down and do it, instead of think about doing it. My story does count. It matters to me. I don’t give a damn whether it will matter to anyone else, whether anyone else will ever read it or not. I will write here in the same spirit I learned to play the flute in the beginning, just by blowing into it hard and in an uncontrolled way, enjoying the sound of my breath, loud and strong, till the notes came, uneven and wavering. I will be fearless. I will take the bull by the horns (so what if this is a cliché and I am mixing my metaphors), I will take charge here, not let this dejection take away from me my singing rights.

I return home with my tomatoes. I leave the groceries unrefrigerated and return to the computer. I am in a fighting mood, and I want to tackle and overcome this demon that has been terrorizing me for weeks and months. I’ll write this damn thing as a way to come to terms with my block.

Blank pages frighten us because they are full of possibility. They are too white. We need to stain them in order to make them ours. We need to make our marks and our scribbles on it, like snail trails, spoor, just to claim some territory as our own.

I blab all over a page, anything that comes to mind, to tell myself I am not afraid.

 My body is feeling like lead, the brain dense with regret, I am entirely encased in matter this morning. I will start here, then, I will start with a description of this hard stone, I will hone myself on it. I will sharpen my wits on it. I will whet my brain on it. I don’t know which metaphor to use, so I’ll let them all stay till I can decide on one, and use it further. I should decide on it now, so I can proceed. I will sharpen myself on it. Yes, it is this, then, that I like so much about writing, that it sharpens me. Writing is my stone. Writing is my drano, it unclogs my brain. It melts my matter and gives me wings. Too many metaphors again.  I want to return to the image of the sword again. I will be a warrior. The pen will be my weapon. Is this image of pen as lance obsolete? But charging into battle with a keyboard just doesn’t make it as a metaphor. I like the idea of the pen as a lance. I would be ashamed if someone saw this scribble, but the warrior in me doesn’t give a shit. I am like Mufumi in Kurusawa’s The Seven Samurai. Such an animal. Such a delight. So very alive. He is for the time being, for the duration of this book, my role model. Perhaps I will have several.

As I scribble, I am stumped again in a major way, by a reminder of something John Ciardi says in his essay On Writing and Bad Writing (and this is the terrible side of having read too much, of having taught writing too much): a bad writer, he says, ‘is out for release, not for containment. He is a self-expresser, not a maker.’ For an entire day I am paralyzed again, till the warrior rescues me once more:

John Ciardi is saying that writing is not therapy, it is not a stone, it is not drano, it is not a sword. He is debunking the personal use of words. He is telling me what I cannot use language for. Nobody tells me what I cannot use language for. Language is my birthright.  Every idea that keeps me from using it as I please, every idea that belittles who I am is bullshit. I will reject it. For the time being.

I plough through the voices of criticism, of restraint, of authority, of fear. “Shhhh” I say to them, and when they don’t respond, I hiss loudly, shoo them out of my territory. I draw a magical circle around myself, like Rama drew around Sita, like the one around the poet in Kubla Khan, a protective circle that keeps away the abducting, destructive voices that would muzzle mine. Not only silence them for the time being while I’m trying to get a rough draft out, but also vindicate my ways. What I wish to do in this piece of writing is to reassure my readers, through my own example, that it is okay to be messed up, that somewhere we all are, that chaos, anxiety, doubt, fear are normal, human, and that there is a way out. That words are one very important way out. That one can reclaim them at any stage of the game. But I cannot do this without letting the readers into my private space, into the area where I use language as an expresser, first, in order to be a maker. Expressing is a stage, a means, a way to making. There are no either/ors here. One leads to the other.

Arriving at this conclusion makes me feel good about myself. And before and during writing it is important for me to feel good about myself, to have confidence and faith in my own, personal way of writing and being. I have just challenged a heavy weight critic, and I have, in my opinion, won. I want to pack one more punch. In making this division between expressing and making, Ciardi has expressed what sounds to me like a full-blown certainty, “Certainly any student who ever brought full-blown certainties into my class was invited to leave,” he says. I invite Ciardi to leave.

For now I must bulldoze and ride roughshod over Ciardi’s ideas, any ideas, no matter whose, mine or someone else’s, that obstruct the process of my writing. This bulldozing is the imperative need of writers who want to continue to write. I have learned, in the process of writing this book,  that one of the most important lessons that a student of writing can learn  about writing is that s/he will never be able to write anything at all if s/he  gets too hung up on how s/he ‘should’ write. To the devil with shoulds.

And in the middle of riding roughshod over a heavy weight, I change the title of the book, from The Write Attitude, to The Writing Warrior. And with this change come a host of holy metaphors, and an arsenal of words like ‘courage’ and ‘fearlessness,’ to assist me in my resolve.

Warriors defend their right to write. Period. Regardless of the quality, the quantity, the objective “worth” of their writing. It helps to think of the object of defense as a territory where you are safe and free. This territory, which is constantly under attack by internal and external forces, and which needs to be defended with constant vigilance, I call the Private Fortress. Let’s change that to Private House. I like houses. One can do as one pleases in them. They are private, protected territory. A  fortress with a metaphysical mote around it. Where you are the master and mistress. Where you can be as naked as you please. Where you can sleep and rest or sit in the sun, or take an hour to write a sentence. Where you can be what and who you are. Where you can lounge about in your pyjamas and freewrite all day, dangle your modifiers to your heart’s content, litter your floors and walls with run-ons and fragments. Where you decide who comes in, when, and who stays out till you are good and ready to let them in.

 The Private House is the opposite of the Public House, or rather, Public Palace. This is where others see your work, where you get rewards for what you do privately. Here we say, “come in, come look, come praise my house. See how wonderful and clean, organized and pretty it is.”  We convert our house into the Public Palace, display and strut our stuff when we want appreciation, rewards, recognition. It is the Public Palace that is the cause of most of our blocks.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying it is wrong to want to be in the Public Palace. It is natural and human to want an audience, to see oneself in the mirrors of other eyes, to desire to communicate, to make a difference, to be of service to mankind, to express for those who cannot.

On this important subject later. But for now, just remember: Don’t let the public poison the private.

KNOWING THE ENEMY: THE BLOCK

Block. What a solid sounding word, heavy and dark: ‘Obstruction; Sudden cessation of a thought process without an immediate observable cause, sometimes considered a consequence of repression. Block. A road block. A  person’s head, as used in the phrase, knock one’s block off. A blockhead. Such a piece upon which chopping or cutting is done: an executioner’s block.’

Block. Sounds echo sense. The word represents a feeling, a thought, a biological and psychological reality. Sounds reinforce sense. Block. A mere word sits like a boulder on the throat of a spring. No, a mountain on the mouth of a river of words. It feels like a column shoved down the mouth. Cannot a word . . . another, more beneficent word, a kinder word, knock it off its perch, defeat it, replace it? But what word? No words remain. The block has blocked them out. The brain is frozen, the tongue tied in knots, the hand paralyzed. The body, the city, the state, the continent, the very earth of one’s being barren and dry, like the land of the Fisher King without the Holy Grail, the chalice of molten, fluid, words. Block. A mere word erases us, takes away our voice. The Block — the writer’s Enemy Number One.

This word triumphs in the writing world. We are either writing, or we have the block, like the plague. We apply the word, we misapply it when we can’t, or don’t, or won’t, due to multifarious reasons, write. There are hourly, daily, weekly, or full-time blocks. And they attack at any stage during the process of writing, before the beginning, in the beginning, in the middle of the middle, at the end, after completion, and anytime during and in between.

Although there are as many kinds of, and reasons for blocks as there are writers, it is safe to say that they are caused by two separate, and related, emotions: fear and desire. These are the poles between which we swing when we hate or love writing, when we think it is difficult or cake. These, fear and desire, the Eastern gurus have told us, are at the root of most of our problems. Though they appear to be the opposite of each other, they are in fact two sides of the same coin, the yin of the yang, and, when we are not conscious of their existence, they both have the same effect, that of making us miserable and unhappy.

I know that most of my blocks stem from these two extremes. My fears revolve around not being good enough, of failing, of succeeding , of revealing too much, of alienating people I write about, of being judged, of running out of time, of dying before I complete a work, of going insane in the pursuit of the right metaphor or phrase, of not having and having a voice. All of these can also be seen from the perspective of desire, since I desire the opposite of what I fear. I want to write well, in a free and flowing way, quickly and perfectly, to get published by major publishing houses, to get great reviews, to be praised and admired and loved for my brilliance, to please and impress, to be considered a great writer,  to succeed to the full extent of my definition of ‘success’,  to win The Big Prize, to make a million dollars, to be on talk-shows, in the glowing flashes of camera bulbs.

Fear and desire cannot, as far as I know, be extirpated. They are there for a reason. When they are proportionate and reasonable (are they ever?), they make us more aware, improve us as writers, motivate us to achieve our dreams. They can either do this, or make us sick, mentally and physically, and even kill us. I know. They killed my former husband, Donald Powell. Literally. He put a pistol in his mouth and blew his brains out.

So I watch this formidable enemy very carefully. When I can, when it isn’t choking the words and hope out of me, I study it, parse it, break it down into its parts, and examine it under a microscope. I want to get to know it, to understand some of its insidious ways, so I can develop strategies to rout it. Once and for all? I know better. This enemy is here to stay. To try to dispel it would be like trying to destroy the weft of the fabric of life. Perhaps the appropriate metaphor here might be: get to know it; embrace it, even.

My latest block, the Big One, was triggered, upon analysis, by all of the above reasons. I had applied for a sabbatical so I could have some time off  to write. Or was it, to rest? So I came up with this idea of writing a book about writing for creative writing classes.  I threw together a project to write a motivational handbook on writing, called The Write Attitude. It would be a brief book identifying the psychology behind the various kinds of blocks, and the solution. One, two, three, four. Simple and easy. I thought I would rip that off in no time, get it over with, then get down to the real business of completing my novel.

But it was the ripping it off in no time that was the problem. There is a gap between our intentions and our achievements, our conscious wills, and the will of the world, our dreams and our realities. This gap is the place where the mysterious universe goes to work to provide us with those experiences — often difficult and painful — that we need in order to fulfill our deeper selves. As soon as you have an idea that you are committed to, life gives you the experiences you need to realize it. If your book is going to have any real depth, that is. So what do I get? A huge, I mean, a humongous block.

The worst ever. The longest, deepest, blackest block imaginable. It is only now, much later, in retrospect, that I can attempt to describe in words my descent into the nine circles of this hell. The thing about infernos, like blocks, is that they are wordless. “Where words break off no thing may be.”  One can only talk or write about them in the past tense.  “That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts,” Nietzsche wrote, in The Twilight of the Gods. While we are experiencing the dark night of the soul, we are speechless, and humorless.  This applies to our best experiences as well. When I was going through my block I was quite simply an amorphous blob of unhappy, desperate feelings that felt irrevocable and final. The only thing I could articulate was generalities like, this is it, this is the end of the path. From here on there is only darkness, wilderness, insanity and   death. I have failed utterly.

Well, actually, I must retract a bit here. Though I have said that blocks are wordless, this is not strictly speaking, true. Blocks have voices of their own, subtle, insidious, subliminal sounds whose purpose is to choke and silence us. They can be loud with words, leaden words, not the ones that make us fly, but the ones that sink us with their weight.

My block appeared as a voice inside my head. Even this decision to use the word ‘voice’ was delayed for days, and fraught with terror (they will think you are schizophrenic). I was riddled by the fear that I wasn’t good enough to write this book (what kind of word is ‘riddled’? Isn’t it a cliché?). I wanted to include a personal narrative (what makes you think that your story counts, or is interesting?’), but couldn’t proceed with it. The title of the book, especially, The Write Attitude, threw me into the slough of despond (you, who are not writing a word, you, who have not published anything in the last several years, you want to tell other blocked writers what the write attitude should be?)

One morning I decided it was time to go to the desk and assert myself, reclaim my voice a little, at least. I turned on the computer, and put the word “Introduction” in bold letters on top of the page, and expected to begin writing in an inspired frenzy. My brain felt like a keyboard without electricity.  I stared at the word for weeks in a state of paralysis. The word looked so portentous (shouldn’t it be ‘pretentious’?) (And shouldn’t the question mark be outside the parenthesis? They will find out that this English teacher doesn’t know her stuff).

I try to stall. I push back my cuticles with an orange stick. I reach for the clippers, push the sharp edge beneath the loosened flaps of skin, and cut them. The little slivers of dead, white skin fall on my black sweats. But this activity is not restful, like it is when I do it in time of leisure, in the same spirit of mindless bliss as the monkeys in India grooming each other, picking lice and eating them. I am not with the activity. I know I should be writing the introduction to the book that hasn’t been written, and may never be written. But I’m going to push hard this morning, assert my mind over this matter. I am in a battle against time. Sabbaticals don’t last forever. But The Block has the upper hand, the louder voice (the tense is all wrong here). I am not up to the battle. I procrastinate some more. I make myself a cup of tea. I swallow two gingko bilobas to give more oxygen to the brain. I think these and some caffeine will get the machinery of my brain cranking. But nothing happens, in the brain, that is. While the stomach gets sour, my brain remains recalcitrant as a donkey. And when I return to the desk, The Block is still there, his vacuous face, with ‘introduction’ written in capital letters on his forehead, staring back at me from the computer screen.

I try to brainstorm, as I have told my students again and again to do when they are stuck. I write, “I have been stuck on writing this fucking introduction for weeks now.” I scratch it out, in propriety’s name, and write, “beginnings are hard . . . for me?” (who gives a shit about you?). I scratch that out, too. The voice borrows my hand and writes, “this sucks.” Nothing works. Stalled mental peristalsis. Nothing moves the bowels of my mind.     

I begin to get that flutter of a feeling, starting in my belly, and spreading all over me. In this vacuum of self confidence, the enemy moves in, overwhelms me with a barrage of voices.

Your brain is dead, stupid. You’ll never get this sabbatical project done. Your writing career is over. Worse, you never really had one. Sure, you won a few national awards in India for your plays; sure your plays were produced there, and your poems translated into several languages, and published, and your articles in newspapers and journals, but that was only because you were a big fish in a little pond. What have you done in America? Sure, you got a book of poems published, but that was only because Donald knew someone, because he believed in you as a writer. Sure your poems got published in several magazines and your short story in an anthology, and you were selected by The New Mexico Arts Division as their Playwright -in-Residence, but look at all your rejections! They would fill up a filing cabinet. And all your unpublished work will fill up another one. Your successes are insignificant compared to the successes of others. Perhaps you were good once, in your youth. Or perhaps you were never any good. If you were, where are the crowds? Where are the reporters and the interviewers?