I always thought that when you turn the page on a writing block, you open it to a clean, fresh expanse of white, uninspired and uninfluenced by ink or lead or life. That when you reach the middle of nowhere, and turn to face another journey, you begin again on a brand new path, untamed and unknown. That when the run of the play had finished, and the stage was swept clean, and the posters torn down, and the frayed costumes stowed away into big bin liners, black as shadows in the night and as easily forgotten, the new ideas and directions and players would come streaming in from the too bright sunshine, excited and busy and full of vitality in a way that only those untouched by time and disappointment can be, to blow away the dust and start something completely new.
But I’m starting to realise that this isn’t the case.
The new page may be plain, but it’s still thin enough to catch a glimpse of the text beneath it, the slight hint of a phrase, a word backwards and mirrored but recognised, spiderweb shadows lurking beneath the surface of that clean new slate, waiting to pull at nibs and tug at the unwanted thoughts you meant to leave buried, and your unhurried and supposedly random writings seem to inexorably follow the slant and curve of the lines made before them, and those before them, and those before them, forever and ever, back to the beginning.
The brand new path is never new, and before long, what looked like uncharted underbrush gives way to a worn track, your feet falling comfortably into the impressions left by dozens of such steps made before, each in a vain attempt to move away from the very point you left, but always, always, curving back to where you, and all, began.
And sometimes, even though the stage is gone, the players different, the script only a distant echo of applause and a half forgotten memory of a curtain rising and falling to billows of dust and hard shafts of light, you find that the new play has the same words, the same scenes, the same themes, the same feelings of love, and betrayal and confusion, even if the costumes and characters are different.
And so you stop, for that briefest of moments, as your pen traces flowing darkness across the pale page, as you climb uphill (and ever so very slightly to the left) through paths thought unknown, as you tread the boards and a phrase that’s so hauntingly familiar it hurts as it bursts from your tongue like a lash of fire and elicits the same scripted response that is both expected and yet so surprising it cuts to the bone, and realise that sometimes, we are doomed to move our feet inexorably through the same steps in this long dance that is life, sometimes the lead, and sometimes the chorus line, but always in time to the beating of hearts that confuse the aches and joys of love with the fear and desperation of loneliness, and hope’s shafts of light with fear’s big black bin liner.
Take me home.
I’m tired of dancing.
Two, Three, Kick, Turn,
WillQ.
Gods Behaving Badly
