A Siren's Call

I wrote this a few months ago, and while I have already released it onto the web, I figured I’d post it here with a few minor revisions so that it can be with the brethren that sprung from it. Because, it’s the spark that started this whole thing, at least for me. It began like this… and everything sort of took off from there.

I never write anymore, I used to, constantly. Letters, words, sentences flowing from my fingers through the keys and appearing almost instantaneously onto that big, bright convex screen, streams of consciousness just rushing from my brain to my fingertips. I wrote a lot, it was soothing, cathartic, and my company in the dark, me, my mind and the screen. And it always returned to the same feeling.

Now the screen is flat, and the colors are sharper, but nothing has truly changed the experience. I just don’t do it. I used to. A lot. Sometimes I think about it, and I long for it, sometimes I wonder why I don’t write anymore. Sure, I write… I write essays, and I write e-mails, and I write instant messages. I write notes on marker boards, and random bits of info on scraps of paper, but I don’t write.

The urge still comes to me late at night, an urge that I can’t even truly describe. I grapple with the words, with the idea, with the logic of it all, but never feel I have anything concrete. I want to write, not just about anything, but about it. It is as if my soul is longing for release, my mind needing some sort of outlet, but that’s not really it. My first memory of it came in the low, hallowed whistle of a train passing through the night. How many times when I was young I sat awake at night, the darkness wrapped around me just as securely as my blankets, staring at my ceiling, and that train beckoned me like a siren’s call. How often I wanted to fling my covers off of me, and run through the deserted streets to find that train, as if the answer could somehow be there.

The struggle is still the same now, a fight for some sort of meaning from this feeling I have deep in my gut, in my mind, in my heart. Frost once wrote, “I could say 'Elves' to him, but it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather he said it for himself.” That’s how it feels to me. I can only grasp some fragment, some part of the mystery. The mystery wrapped inside an enigma. It is not loneliness, not discontentment, nor contentment, not fear or anxiety, or excitement. It’s not need, or worry, not calm, or wonderment. Is it rational? Irrational? I know others have felt it, but here I am still searching.

It is the sensation of staring at a Hopper painting, of singing to myself late at night while driving in the car alone, the rumble of the wheels on the pavement and the streaking lights of suburbia surrounding, but never touching me. It is gazing up at the stars on a cool spring night and feelings so small, and yet so large at the same time. It is the existence of a sparkling, shining world of newly fallen snow, where everyone is safe, yet isolated in their little igloo of knowledge. It seems to take shape in Something Wicked this Way Comes, in the insomnia of Charles Halloway and the running pf Will and Jim. But does Bradbury truly understand it? Do I misunderstand him? It seems to be a paradox, but it cannot be. I will not believe that. It makes me feel like Holden, wandering through the streets of New York, searching for something he doesn't understand.

It is the longing that someday someone will understand, and the fear that no one will ever be able to grasp it, least of all me. The drive to discover the true meaning, and the wish that one day someone will be able to help me find it.

And as I tap away at the keys, it always comes back, welling up in my gut and causing my mind to long to understand it, my heart to reach out and grab it. It is the realization that every word I write, every thought I think, every feeling that strikes a chord in my being is inherently entangled with it, this unknown that is so familiar. It is the hope that humanity has some purpose, and that I have some reason for being, but the fear to truly believe.

Sometimes I look back for it in the ignorance of childhood, sometimes forward into the future, but it’s always there, throbbing in my gut, whispering something I cannot truly hear.