May 31, 2003
writing at twilight
by sabater
In Puerto Rico there is cactus that blooms only at night and it has one of the sweetest aromas in the world --a cross between Lilies of the Valley and Camellias. 
Dama de noche (Midnight Lady) is so wonderful to watch. She is all closed up during the day and slowly, as night falls, her petals begin the dance that will open and expose her aroma to the world for just a few hours before she droops and falls off the morning after. For years, this is what I felt happened when I essayed through journals or web log articles.
Essaying happens for me mostly after midnight. I eagerly await the silence that envelops my apartment after midnight. There is a song that laments the silence that comes to a house where no one can sleep. Well, I love the silence of a house where everybody sleeps but me. It's magical, almost mystical. And its a habit that goes all the way back to my childhood. I would wait for everybody to go to sleep and use my Girl Scout torch to light my room so that I could read and write in my journal. Later on it was the glare of our old black and white television set with the occasional Monty Python show shining my twilight creations.
I use this silence to awaken my whole being to writing. Maybe it's because all my senses are involved when I have pen and paper in hand. I love the first shock of whiteness of an empty page and soft rustling of a pen stroking paper. And then there is the softness of cellulose that has never been etched by pen or pencil. "Virgin" notebooks are quite a sensuous delight. I actually troll stationery and art supply stores for different kinds of paper, notebooks, binders and pens. Writing is a sensual and sensory experience : All my senses are very much active during my good old style "analog" writing.
Then something happened, about 10 years ago, that changed everything. Writing became a physically painful experience that would completely consume me. I could not sleep, my stomach would be a mess and I would be so overcome with a sense of anxiety and stress that would wipe me out. I would walk around exhausted until the day the essay, article or brochure was signed, sealed and delivered but, most importantly, forgotten.
Interesting that during those years I did quite an amount of acting. Get onstage with hundreds of people watching? No problem. Record a radio commercial that thousands would hear? Sure, why not. Shoot a TV ad that millions would see? Okey-dokey.
Then there is the interesting fact that I did write quite a lot during those years. I churned out weekly study materials for my students. Wrote reports, syllabi, regular and final exams. More shocking to me is the realization that I spent 4 years at a Fortune 500 company working as a corporate communicator and technical writer developing a reference manual that was more than 2,000 pages long and for which I wrote and/or edited more than half the content. Then there is the more introspective pages, the journals that I have in boxes and lying around somewhere in this apartment. Most have epigrams thanks to my obsessive reading of Nietzsche. There are also some poems, stories, even the seedling of a couple of novels but most importantly e-mails.
I belong to quite a number of e-lists and have been known to spend hours replying to posts that deal with topics ranging from art, parenthood, politics and . I happily e-mail because I really do not equate it to writing. It is more akin to talking. There is an immediacy and urgency to an e-mail that I do not find in other kinds of writing. If writing is more about introspection then e-mailing is all about conversing. And talking is what I do best --I have been blessed with an almost unhealthy lack of self-consciousness. I'll talk to everyone and anyone.
Still, up until recently, even if my e-mails are read by probably thousands of people around the world, when it came to publishing, the thought just froze me dead on my tracks. It's as if the word 'publishing' conjured images of not just an expose private life but of my whole being, all my private parts being exposed and paraded to the wold. So the idea really filled me with fear and shyness. Funny because a lot of people when would never think of me as the quite and shy type. Ever. Not even strangers.
It took me 10 years to understand why as a writer I remained 'silent' to the world. With writing as opposed to speaking I came to believe I was giving away a piece of me. It's as if the paper would become an extension of my skin and the words, tattoos revealing my soul and in the process deforming my image. So in the end, the fear was more about looking bad than doing bad. Well not anymore.
Even with all my years of reading Blanchot, it i now that I get more than ever the idea that this is not me, not my soul, not even a reflection. What is appearing in front of me as I type are words that somehow will captivate my ideas and, thus, my audience. I really have no control over how these words will be comprehended. I cannot control them beyond this mere act of putting them down on paper and eventually turning them into electronic impulses rendered real on your computer screen. It's somebody else's reading what will give life to these words, no matter how many blogs or pages I fill in a lifetime.
This has been the most liberating realization I have had in a while. Better to sport the scars of war than to die a coward. I'd rather be mocked and read than passed by in silence. Because in the process, no matter what, people will remember. Like the penetrating aroma of a Midnight Lady, my presence will linger.
Posted by Liza in Blogs, Epiphany, Life
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