Stare at the blank page. Switch your text editor to night-mode. White abyss, black abyss; does it make a difference?
You think that, maybe, inaccessible to you, there exists a color that will draw words from your soul. Graphogenetic. Like green black boards are to the mathematicians who fill them, chalk dust cocaine crop circles forming a delirium of polygons, formulae, sequences of integers intimately coded into the universe.
You, however, are not a purveyor of numbers. Your letters have known meanings, are not abstract, not variable. One could say the letters don’t matter, except insofar as they form words. Nor do the words matter, really, unless strung together they sing.
Gnash your teeth, vacuum-headed author, document as empty as your skull. Meditation has never appealed to you, and in fact your attempts at it have proven futile, your brain-chatter decidedly irrepressible and un-peaceful. Yet in this moment you’ve achieved a Buddha-like stasis, the experience of non-being, or of pre-verbal, pre-sentience being.
You want to run a pickaxe through your brain, onto the page, pinning a squirming idea to the ink. You go night fishing in your own mind, casting a line into uncertain waters; you retrieve nothing but the moon and the waves. Not even a monster.
Switch off night-mode. The screen is bright as bridal veils, and you can see little whirlpools in it, the tadpole distortions of lace. You recall an interview between a critic and a successful filmmaker.
“Idea, concept, they are beautiful, yes? Like maiden at wedding. Flower. Very nice, perfect.”
“Come night, you are now husband, you will tear wedding dress off. Now you create family, child maybe, union.”
“Yes, this is what I mean to say: to create, you must rape the bride.”
It echoes in your skull. It sounds like truth.
Gather the tape, the rope, the rope, the knife. Your best leather gloves. You know what to do; go where the lovely people gather.