Head submerged under the soapy bath water, in the lilting words of reggae legend Johnny Nash, I can see clearly now. Outside, the solstice rains are easing up, as the sun imprints behind the silver clouds. There are no obstacles in my way. Except one. The writer’s block, blocking my literary path to aesthetic progress. On this day of days.
My floating thoughts turn to penmanship and the thirteen-year writer’s block I experienced during my exile on suburban street. Over this dark, thirteen-year chapter, I didn’t pen a single word to paper, didn’t bash out a teasing sentence for the craic, nor did I punch out a purposeful paragraph on the QWERTY keyboard. Not even once in a blood-red supermoon.
I suffocated creatively under a thick, murky, medicated blanket of crippling artistic stagnation. Sleep seemed a better option, as I day-dreamed, wading through the swampy waters of the long days, waning weeks, waxing months, and years of forgotten full moons.
And I would dream of writing. A deep, claggy, anxious dream.
A dream on repeat. Of pouring intensely over the jumbled notes of my raw, imperfectly perfect novel – scrawled in blood ink, across endless wafting sheets of white paper. Unable to decipher the devious meaning behind these inky notes, I figured I was doomed to be trapped forever in this nightly hellish loop of writer’s purgatory.
Downstairs, taking lungful’s of fresh rain-kissed air breezing through the window – I look to lift the curse of the writer’s block – to magic some divine inspiration, to generate some creative alchemy, to unpick the padlock of the deep buried writer’s chest of endeavour.
So, I turn to the Writer’s Bloc, lined up in an orderly fashion on the long-abandoned bookshelf. I am searching for something – a stand-out cover, a knock-out quote, or striking chapter heading – and begin digging out the forgotten books of yesteryear.
I leaf speculatively through the pages: of an intimate biography of the late, great, comedian Bill Hicks; flick through the investigatory ‘Hidden Agendas’ of John Pilger; and idly scan the words from a philosophers tome called ‘Sophie’s World’. All books untouched for years. Unloved. Gathering dust from the sands of time. And today looks and feels like a whirling sandstorm of the mind. Not a seed of inspiration. Nothing doing. Not on this day of days.
Rainwater is pouring, in beads of mercury teardrops, streaking down the lenses of my glasses. Up here on the sleeting gale-blown summit of Mill Hill, I watch my in-laws dog Paddy sprint over the wilds like a wound-up, battery-operated bunny, sniffing other dog’s arseholes, and sticking his nose down rabbit holes.
And I feel a surge of soulful gratitude, as I contemplate on how the end to my near-terminal writer’s block ended a month into Lockdown, as the rampant Virus triggered a first wave across the Island shores. A germ of an idea, a seed of hope, took root in the soil bed of my consciousness – and so ‘The Soul Asylums’ was born.
A Voice from the wilderness, about the Voices in the wilderness, I muse, as I make the trek home past the million-pound piles of Mill Hill.
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