The Tragedy of Writing

The act of writing, that tragic enterprise requiring the evisceration and review of heart and soul, appears (in my case) to be a penance of sorts, an opportunity to account for the nature and shape of my life, cascading backwards as it is, in a series of enumerated spaces made artificially distinct by the cleverness of chronometry,  that man-made artifice, the geography of time. 

My life – shaped by happenstance and occasional intent – a life often at odds with the conventions of society, those bordered spaces within which we’re directed to find a way to flourish in gardens not of our design. 

My life – an aggregate of outbursts and appeals – leads me, insistently, inevitably, to this present (a lens in motion through which the past may be reviewed and the future revised, despite the threads of fate). So I write the past with an eye to the future. With an eye to the potential that exists despite the crazed cartography of actions and activities entered into during moments of defiance – and ignorance. Everything is possible every morning, before the looming day is swallowed by the night.

The tragedy of the past we write is the passage from potential to persistence: There is a loss engendered when the lens of the present embraces the future it envisioned, only to deposit it in the catalogue of history. At that moment – the moment the future in fact unfurls – it becomes the past – and thus immutable. What was once an aggregate of possibility is now persistent history.

And yet, even with the loss, that transition from expansive opportunity to a new and reliable immutability, that moment signals our shift. Just as the past trails back of us, splayed out from the apex of the present like light exiting a prism, the future, unrealized as yet, takes a similar form, a widening scope of unbirthed moments, flowing freeform towards this ascending prick of light the present represents, to imprint itself upon the past like a camera obscura of remembrances not images. And the conical expanse of our future, widening away from the lens of our present, that is the space within which we might make our mark, challenging the dour predictions of those living their lives backwards. 

We write the past to predict our future. To claim it before it can be consumed by the present. We write our pasts and in doing so atone for our sins and arrange our absolution in the poetry and prose we compile. The tragedy of writing is revealed under the fine cuts executed upon our pulsing hearts with the instrument we’ve honed, this polished blade of query and commitment. The tragedy of writing is revealed in the release we find when the piece is done, when we put the pen down. When we are released, for the moment at least, from the requisite review of all we’ve done in an effort to imagine ourselves into a future of our own design (for that is the real purpose here). 

We write the past to create a future we deserve.