An inkblot   

    There was a man, a writer, Nevil Shute, who wrote a book, "Incident at Eucla." His last sentence reads: "There was a fluffy young girl with them, she was weeping, tears running quietly down her cheeks." The manuscript stops. That day Nevil Shute died. And no one can imagine just which word he would use to write his next sentence, and no one will ever know what was going to happen at Eucla. Try to predict it and…"

    It happens again. Betrayed, I am unable to finish this piece of writing I’ve started. In the glimmering light of a desktop lamp, a shapeless silhouette over the paper looks back at me. An inkblot. The line drawn out in a precise, calligraphic way lost its meaning, bogged down into this violet dilution. I am stuck, have written myself out. Who shall I blame? Myself? Each one and all around me? The phone, which yanked me away at the most inappropriate moment? I had impatiently awaited this call, but not at this precise minute. Loud and tasteless music, intruding through the closed curtains? The winged Muse who, talked away by her Parnassian friends, completely forgot about me?

   Here I am, weak and worn out, sitting in the darkness at my desk. People say I am a genius and I am kindly grateful to them. But why do I have that strange feeling of a story that has lost its surprise.

    "Next day I set down to write," Richard Bach, my favorite writer, once said, "a story had gone flat and dull." It’s more than a feeling, more an assurance that with every second phrase, sparkling into my head, "no matter what word I would choose, an echo in my mind&58; You've said this before. This is old news."

    Every time I draw the pen closer to the paper, I tremble, wondering whether I can manage not to repeat the already told. Oh, how easy and tempting to say "It’s new in the history and it is my!" But for chiliads of Homo Sapiens’s history, his sense-intellect had rendered and described the surrounding Being many number of times.

     The question is what if it all merely becomes copying and repeating? As soon as I lay hands on somebody’s saying I would be guilty of plagiarism. It’s worse than a shame. It is a disgrace, confession in inability to create something new, genuine, and fresh.

   Just what, truly, is innovation? We shamelessly take old bones, wrap them with pieces of flesh and, voila, believe that we have a new revelation. Almighty noble knight Ivanhoe and guardian of the poor Robin Hood armed with futuristic weapons they only loose their romantic aura. "New adventures" &45; do they really became such, but not the alien for our beloved heroes? Is there any difference whether today’s Desdemona would be strangled or dies in a car wreck, when the cause of both cases remains the same &45; a jealous husband and an envious friend?

   Why agonize, sorting out numerous variations of a phrase that later may only be found excessive and needless? Does anyone really care what I write, who I write for, whether for my pleasure, my own fancies, or for the others, for humanity? Literature is a powerful educational, entertaining and propagandistic instrument, no one would deny. Fictional or not, it saves us from everyday boredom, informs and misinforms us. It does its job. We allow those printed and scripted lines to penetrate the deepest chasms of our conscience and feelings, though sometimes giving them only a slight glimpse.

   I’d say, "I write, therefore I am", but it would be too trite and simplistic. Why agonize? Rehashing Irving Stone's, the author of "Agony and Ecstasy," I say&58; "A man must be a writer not because he can be a writer, but only because he can't not to be as so. Writing is a destiny of those who will suffer without it." That’s why we agonize.

   It was, as I recall, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, who said that it's much easier to write about Socrates than about a Lady and her cook. Socrates is famous and he is long gone. There are no fantasy limits in writing about him, but a Lady - she is real. And one more&58; "they seize the great because they can't invent the little."

   It is a matter of reiteration. Again and again, proud or shy, you plan to describe the magnificent beauty of sunset or leaf fall. What new can you say? Not much. Sunset in the mountains differs from sunset in the valley. Others have outrun me already on this topic for centuries. There are many great and unknown, worshiped and forgotten toilers of plume and papyrus, blind geniuses and quick-eyed imitators.

    What am I? I don’t know. I don’t want to be either one or the other. Some people say I am genius. I know what geniuses feel. It’s not about the glory and fame, but how and what it is to be damn. Surviving the endless battle, they are compelled to the ruthless fight for the right and privilege to be called genius. They don’t really have any choice. You either fight, or you will be overthrown, trampled underfoot, and destroyed. In the best case, you will be forgotten.

    The question is bustle and fuss. Writing is to double the fuss. But for a writer that doubled fuss is more desirable than halcyon days. Because of only a single inkblot, now I have to rewrite the whole page, but I am grateful to that little ink lake for the chance it gives me, a chance to relax and take a fresh look on what I have done, a new bridge to detour my thoughts to something abstract, sublime, - and therefore amusing, - to dream and to philosophy. And though I’ll spend extra minutes rewriting, but I will find what I had lost, or maybe not lost, but what I managed to find in the first place. Maybe, right now, I am creating something new, not as genius as I wished, but something of my own, genuine. Something that nobody has ever created before.

    A sip of fresh air that what the inkblot is for me. Let there be more sips like that. Otherwise, it is hard to survive.