I seek the quickening of mind and spirit.
I am but one soul, adrift now for 130 days. Lank thought and turgid intentions befoul my aspiration; the fulfillment of a dream seems naught now but a strange unknown land – with each day that passes without glimpse or hearsay – it sinks further into the silent fathoms of the mind that entomb all that is unfulfilled or unrealized. Thus, I do sit, and think of things that spurred me into the great unknown before. Before I lost the threads of sentences to weave, and before the words that would build an unformed world passed through my hands like sand and time; I spied great terrors and miserable pleasures of all persuasions to inflict and infest the threadbare realm I laboured to create. I wrote, I sketched, I blitzed: then obliterated; returning to scorched earth and blank pages – only to rebuild and invest in a richer darkness. I was both god and ungod. Mountains rose and fell with the stroke of my keys. Seas spread into infinity where I let them bleed like the punctured bellies of soldier-boys – there the fiber of things was slashed and tattered – and so, out of the black deeps unto the haggard light of a bastard realm did dark things beach themselves upon the shores of my grave new world.
Amongst the chaos and the sorcery something went astray. Life got in the way of writing. The self-imposed exile I had sequestered myself within ended; I moved in with a beautiful woman who seems to adore me, and got on with a real-life instead of making one up. These are all good things – I feel at peace and understood by her, which makes me very happy, but my rather self-involved pursuit of writing and publishing a punk-fantasy took a bit of a back seat. I moved from the South to the North East and have been without a job since I left Norfolk in March. The move, the ensuing adjustments to a new life and the scouring away of several grimy layers of ego have meant that any serious attempts at finishing The Wizard’s Eye have been postponed – until now. This time of year always finds me feeling restless, hungry and forward-thinking – this year even more-so than usual; with so many new possibilities emerging like mushrooms out of the umbra of a forest floor – I’m constantly electrified by what might happen. As summer wanes though, I feel the need to settle more into a creative routine, and establish discipline. I’ve burnt out on blogrolls and news feeds recently – bagging twitterers like a Royal on a pheasant shoot – googling and such, when I should and could have been writing. The Internet provides countless tracks to quick and easy satisfaction; yet it is often a sleazy, soul-less and pedestrian way to slide through the ocean of stimulus that resides within its infinite vaults. Though there are many places to occupy the mind during creative lulls, turning to it for sustenance too readily can be the mental equivalent of eating take-away seven days a week. There are no true custodians or guides to the Web, and for a spaced-headed fantasist like myself it can so easily lead to one’s doom. Yet we need not fear to tread where we fear to tread – the Internet is a wondrous tool; its realisation a boon – I only caution distractable wayfarers like myself – we who ought to endeavor to separate ‘research’, ‘sight-seeing’ and ‘working’ from a bundled marathon of caffeine/nicotine infused scrutiny – its too easy to click and play the day away, creating nothing yourself other than an erratic trail winding through the virtuality.
I think that’s the root of my buckleless swashing. When times have gotten harder; when I’ve been distracted or preoccupied with the mundane or banal, I’ve let my hand slip from the tiller. I’ve realised now, that whenever I have produced a solid body of words, that they have come from enforcement of the adage ‘write everyday’. The quality might not be Shakespearean; the vision of a Moorcockian-redux might not be fully realised in one foul stroke, but by being dedicated and diligent a stygian brew begins to darkle on the page one word at a time. As I psych myself up for another assault on The Wizard’s Eye I return – momentarily – to reflect upon the visions of the virtuosos who inspired my predilection to the dark path. My mind is plastered with a melange of imagery drawn from a pool of astounding imagineers: John Blanche and Ian Miller. They are the cream that tops this pool of talent I draw inspiration from, and their work has always been able to re-ignite the cold flames that fuel my more industrious periods. Thus, I give thanks for their superior dedication and the dark and wondrous imaginations they have distilled with an enviable prolificacy for those who struggle in their shadows.
You can view some of their awesome work here:
Nocturne Redux † 