you as a sound just as silent as none

i finished writing a play today.

i can't be entirely sure it's a fantastic piece, but i can say it's a start, it's a step in the right direction towards becoming a writer again, or fulfilling my personal duties as a so-called writer. not to discredit this blog, which truly has become my most heartfelt project at the moment. but there's something to be said for this deep introspection and subsequent shoveling of emotions onto the page.

you begin to get a little lost in yourself after a while.

before i left new york--and this could be redundant, really--i became very focused on me. (i know, my god, we get it.) what i mean is that i stopped reading any fiction, stopped writing anything altogether that did not have to do with personal growth. it seemed everything i was doing, my entire life, was twinged with this hunger for reclamation and reinvention of myself. and quietly, without any fanfare or drama, i'd say, it was this thing i did to and with myself. i think i'm reiterating this point a bit now because i miss that so desperately, this sense of climbing up a mountain in great leaps and bounds.

i had something of a mini-crisis--or a rather, it came to a head, or at least a shoulder--the other day. i had gone for a walk to see the royal botanical gardens, but i stopped in a fairly mundane park probably a quarter of a mile from the actual gardens. i just needed a park, really. i missed central park at that moment, the great meandering expanse of it, the "unmissableness" of it, in that i always knew how to get there, and where in the park i wanted to be. i'd spent a number of hours there during the past summer, eventually often in the same spot, by the same tree on cedar hill, which i loved. it was wide-open and yet close enough to be among people. still, everyone kept to themselves, and there were no frisbees or baseballs to dodge, and there were trees and curves in the hill. so much character, so many spots to claim as your own.

and i remember, one time the summer before, much more lost, and so much more disoriented about my entire life, i was wandering the city and eventually the park, and eventually grew incredibly, inexplicably tired. i think it was actually on the bottom of cedar hill, close to the exit onto 5th avenue, that i laid down with my ipod and just fell asleep. it was such a banal and open place to lay down and sleep--and a terrible idea, i don't know why i still have this ipod, how no one thought to pull it out of my dead hand--but it seemed to be all i could do at that moment. i remember this feeling of being so very far away from home, wherever that was.

it was a similar feeling earlier this week, except much colder, and i was not tired so much as incredibly agitated. i was sitting on a bench, adjusting and readjusting my position. and eventually i'd have to move because whatever leg i was leaning on had fallen asleep. i was writing in this notebook i've done all my new york writing in, trying to settle in so i could just ramble and figure out what i was feeling, what the words were i needed to say.

i know i get to these points of revelation in my stories--the ghost of the past i saw in the subway, what my petition actually said--and i don't actually tell you the most interesting details. so without transcribing--because i knew as i was writing that i did not want to be married to these ideas, but i did want a brief torrid affair with them--i will admit that i essentially was asking, "what the hell am i doing here?" i was questioning why i would leave a life so on the road to completion in new york, a life that in retrospect was coming together quite beautifully, and come all the way here without a plan or an idea of what the point was.

we don't need to spend any time counterpointing this idea. i eventually got myself to the point of saying, "you're here for a reason. and you need to be patient as this reason reveals itself to you." and then i got up and kept walking, and went to the royal botanical gardens, and they were beautiful and unlike anything i'd seen in new york, such natural and yet well-attended beauty, surrounded by developed civilization. walking along, i saw a small placard that said "yearning for home," and described how these gardens were built for the europeans who had come to melbourne in the 1800s and were homesick for this kind of landscape amid such a rough, undeveloped terrain. i loved the idea of having a space to re-identify yourself in.

i ended up staying out the whole day, eventually meeting my friend john in the city, grabbing some dinner, doing a bit of window shopping, and heading back to craig's. and the next day, i sat down and picked up where i left off on this piece i had started back in new york, something that had come out of an idea for a bit of dialogue and grew and developed from there.

and fair enough, there were, let's say, some autobiographical elements to the piece, and one of the characters may have essentially been me-ish. but i wrote ten pages, and another five today, and may have very well finished the damn thing.

between that sense of accomplishment, and the fact that the melbourne writers festival has just started, i do sense my creativity getting stoked, my desire, among all this literary appreciation and analyzation, to be heard as well. i suppose all this to say that one of the main reasons i came to australia in the first place was because i could focus more on my writing. and one of my fears was that i would get all the way here and find only the same writers' block i experienced in new york.

to cap all of this, i found it very interesting what one author was talking about at a discussion this morning. someone asked him, if he were teaching a college writing course, what he would tell his young, developing students. and he said, "i'd almost recommend going out and doing something for ten or fifteen years--really live a life--and then write. so many young writers haven't done very much with which to write about."

the other woman in the discussion disagreed, had said that you didn't necessarily need life experience to be able to create characters and situations, that children were often incredibly capable of that. and he agreed, but added, "i just think there's a certain depth that can be reached with life experience."

and i think maybe, in tackling the great iceberg that is the reason i moved to australia, part of it was to have experienced this complete uprooting of my life, to have moved to the other side of the world, to reclaim my self-imposed title of writer, and then have someone say, "life experience will enhance your writing."

and then to go home, and to write.