It’s a slab of solid concrete just sitting there. A perfect grey cube, immobile and intimidating, parked at the centre of my consciousness and refusing to budge, sucking all the normal cascading flow of verbiage and swallowing it into its unknowable innards and giving nothing back in return. A huge bulky mass of stuff that won’t shift, not even slightly, no matter how hard you push against it. Like an unwanted guest it just arrived one morning and now refuses to leave. Instead it just remains…there! Unwilling or unable to budge but constantly sucking the life out of me and leaving my mind empty of anything approaching an original thought.
I’ve not had a three-or-more-day block for a while now. Things, as they say, had been ticking along rather nicely. I suppose on most scales, we’ve had quite a good run recently, my tiny mind and me. The thoughts kept coming, the banter flowing and the daily output of words seemed to be rolling out rather easily. My suspicion of course is as always that they were rolling out rather too easily and there would soon be the inevitable backlash, and at least I was right about that. I got up one morning and there it was, the block, sitting there with not even the slightest glimmer of a cheery “hello” to greet me or warn me, just a huge almighty block that sat there in my way.
I can of course prepare myself for this eventuality. There is always the list to fall back on for ideas. But for three days now the list has failed me. Up and down its pages I have scrolled seeking out a spark of inspiration, a tiny hammer with which to chip away at the block, but the words were all a jumble of pointless nonsense and there was no grammatical mortar available for me to take those many idea-bricks and build them into a house of reason, a patio of enlightenment or even a barbeque pit of “so what?”
The list having failed me, I turn to other solutions. On my desk there sits a cubic book (now there’s a tongue-twister to avoid…) which was bought to help me with my writing when I hit these solid blocks of concrete. Nearly 800 pages of ideas to flip through designed to inspire me, but even that inspiration wasn’t able to get beyond the block. I flip to a page: “Write a character from the point of view of being on his deathbed”. Yeah, right. Just what we all need of a morning…
Turn the problem into the solution. Write about the block itself… Well, how’s that working for you? Thought so…
Maybe it was the heat. The mornings recently have been noticeable for their all-pervading swealtering heat, the kind of day when you walk into a room and the air is thick and hot and sticky, the kind of treacly air that simply will not move and still seems to be sucking the life out of you even as you breathe it in to give you the life you need. It was so hot that thoughts just seemed to vanish from the mind and dissipate into the choking miasma all around and instead of bouncing around and sparking off each other to form new thoughts and ideas they just hung there like surly teenagers being forced to go out and visit relatives for the day when they’ve far less interesting stuff to be done at home and with less effort.
Maybe it was the tiredness. It was bound to catch up with me, what with all those early mornings and late night insomniac mental meanderings combining with the hot stickiness of the air, something was eventually bound to give. Something always is, but the half-imagined fuzzy buzzing noises that keep on popping up between the words as the eyelids flicker and try to sleep but then won’t sleep means that a phrase or a thought or even the beginnings of an idea will start to form but won’t link up with the others and sits there on the tip of my mind before spinning away into the eternal grey void and slamming hard into the block.
Maybe it was the stuff I’ve been reading. Other writings can be a joy and an inspiration or they can sometimes suck you down into a pit of your own despair when you decide that your own words can never be good enough, inspiring enough or witty enough in comparison to those that dance so easily from other minds not hampered by the huge grey block that you are chained to. Why is it that they can find something new and fresh to say about our world when all I can see is that huge monotonous grey slab stretching to the horizon in all directions and showing me nothing of beauty and inspiration to work with?
Maybe it’s the feedback to what I’ve already written. Some people get upset, or wish I hadn’t said certain things, or just get angry, or irritated or just plain disinterested. Sometimes I’ve got it wrong, or sometimes they have, but if the block does have a voice, it murmurs just below the level of perception right into the very core of what passes for my soul and says “No… Don’t do this… Walk away… Nothing to see here… Nothing for you to do... Nothing you can do…”.
The whispering death, the gnawing self-doubt all fed by the block.
Maybe I thought more information about who my readers were would help to inspire me to greater works, but instead it seems to have had quite the opposite effect. Now I know what percentage of your visitations are less than five seconds in duration, and how few of you there actually are accompanying the journey suddenly the block seems to be clearly winning.
As blocks go, this has been a biggie and is showing no signs of vanishing any time in the foreseeable future as sometimes they are wont to do. I once read that the concrete in the Hoover dam is still not completely set after all these years, so why is my block so solid, so immovable? Perhaps I would be better to leave the bock here and instead drift away myself, and consider it from a new angle. At the unveiling of new statue of Ronald Reagan, a huge bronze mass that is so dense that it is perhaps itself likely to change the gravity of the London that orbits it, it was suggested that he was like a mountain and his impressiveness is best viewed from a distance, so maybe I need to run away and view the block from afar. Maybe it is only a breezeblock, or a sugar cube and it my sense of self that needs rescaling. Perhaps as my confidence grows it will diminish to a size so small that I shall be able to crush it underfoot and barely notice it as it crumbles.
But not yet, for today it remains a mightly edifice, immovable and impassible, but already I think I see just a hint of light beyond it, so perhaps our relative dimensions are beginning to alter, and I will grow more robust as it begins to crumble to dust, but it might take a few millennia to alter the balance of power.
Perhaps all we can do is wait, and see…
I too am blocked at the moment with no will to unblock it. Maybe it's the weather, perhaps it's the time of year, or perhaps I just have nothing left to say. I don't know.
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