After Ezra K. Although this is not a post about ghost shoez.

I’ve been trying to write a big status rerum1 of a blog post ever since I stopped keeping a journal two years ago, just after finishing uni. (The last one devolved into a barely coherent theological treatise.) Not that I think anyone would have been interested to know what happened to me during those two (or three) years, the journals I had kept for myself after all—still it nagged me, the silence, and I kept arriving at the same conclusion whenever I tried to justify to myself my failing to write anything: that the years I’ve failed to record are gone, in the worst sense of the word. I’ve always thought of photos and videos as paltry excuses for preserving memories, preferring the genuineness, the rawness of the written word (or maybe, if I were more honest, their malleability, their submitting to my whims instead of those of the often ugly truth). Lately I’ve discovered a new excuse: that I was too busy living in the moment, and that it was better that way, so much so that my failure to write was not only excuseable, but preferrable.

Of course I’ve attempted various times to start writing again. There was a line from One Day though that kept popping up on my head whenever I’m buying a new notebook, sniffing (resignedly) the lush creamcolored pages I know I’ll never fill up: that maybe what I thought was a passion for writing was merely a ‘fetish for stationery.’ I never fully understood why I stopped, although I have a theory: my old writing was filled with angst (but what teenager’s isn’t); but slowly, imperceptibly, the angst was replaced by exhaustion, resignation. ‘I have become one of them,’ I found myself writing again and again2 throughout these three (or two) years, but I no longer idea what ‘them’ even means now, or whether my idea of the other even made sense back when I thought I understood what it meant.

  1. And maybe to write, in the manner of Pound, something so uppity as: The state of things here in London is, as I see it, as follows: I find Mr. Yeats the only poet worthy of serious study, &c. As to his English contemporaries, they are food, sometimes very good food, for anthologies. There are a number of men who have written a poem, or several poems, worth knowing and remembering, but they do not much concern the young artist studying the art of poetry. ↩

  2. Exhibit 1, for example. ↩