To Begin Again

Write. Write poetry, - write in rhyme, - if it is only "One, two, Buckle my shoe, Three, four, Open the door." Form the habit. It is often convenient. It is a refuge from ennui. It may do good. Any one of you who refrains from writing for fear of ridicule, is a coward. Don't be a coward ... If your heart is stirred within you to write, write! (1)

I have been avoiding this blog since I came back to Guadeloupe after a summer in New York. I had come back with a new determination to succeed...

You see, I have no intrinsic need to write. I have not filled notebooks with first poems or scraps of a novel. It took me over a decade to fill half the pages of a journal. Instead, I write to satisfy a need. As I wrote some months ago, "Blogging is a way of saying, I exist! ... It is an outlet for my creative and intellectual energies, which otherwise would surely wither and die inside of me, making me very sick." In that same post, even as I was affirming my need to write, I foretold its end: a more complete and satisfying life would eventually supplant that need.

Not writing, then, became a proxy for that more complete and satisfying life. Eager to succeed in that goal, I got ahead of myself and choose not to pick up writing again. Its a distraction, I told myself. Truthfully, not to write was a blunt demonstration of will. But, who was I fooling? I would have gone on fooling myself if I had not come across Hamilton's words in Elaine Showalter's book "A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx" (2), a literary history of American women writers. It is difficult not to feel moved by womens' early struggles to express themselves through writing. I may enjoy privileges and rights that were only imaginable to Hamilton and her fellow women writers, but I find myself in a situation where I am bound by similar constraints and where 'emotional needs and frustrations drive me to the pen'.

I am still determined. Really, I have no choice. But there is a place for writing in my life and I do myself a disservice to hasten its obsolescence.

This is so serious for my simple posts on my tarts and my hikes. Dickensen and Brontë it is not. But such is the power of writing, where quality nor longevity determines the value to the author herself. And so, I begin again...


(1)
Hamilton, Gail. Country Living and Country Thinking. Montana: Kessinger Publishing Ticknor and Fields, 1863.





(2)
Showalter, Elaine. A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009.