Dying to Write

Deleuze: “Most writing is run-of-the-mill neurosis”.

No wonder writers are so often drunks. Neurosis: Ideas that hurt. A painful idea detaches itself from the overly-edited prose and wanders wraith-like through the tangled forest valleys of the writer’s interior world: the idèe fixe, the horcrux, the cursed thought. One wonders if the form of writing transmutes neurosis from out of something worse, or if it is the very act of writing that causes such neurosis, navigating between the desire of this thing that wants to be said and the defense of my inability to say it. Does writing conjure a demon? Or is it the demon who is doing the writing? I am drawn ever onwards by the the torturous and indeterminate meanings that sluff off even the shortest of paragraphs. “There is so much agony!” I complain to a friend. “Then don’t do it anymore!” he says. The symptom is that I can’t not do it. Is it the agony itself that compels me to repeat? Perhaps negative capability, that facility of contradiction praised by the poets, is negative in the sense that it feels like your brains are melting out of your ears. At night I dream of a negroni, a gin gimlet, a whiskey sour—but I don’t drink much these days.  In the morning, a new idea glares at me from out of a thicket, beckoning to me with its claws. I approach transfixed; It just feels so good.