The day I realized I wanted to be a writer, the ember of this ambition continuously burns since then, steadily casting a reddish glow in the depths of my soul. It was then that I decided loitering in the streets, hanging out to kill time with friends whose only vision of the future was an alien world they could not define with their notion of perpetual present, had to end. The circumstances called for a hermetic life, dedicated on reading books and writing the whole day. I saw no other path leading toward the life I knew destined for me other than this.
I was in the middle of my college studies then. I would spend most of my time browsing and scanning the books on the shelves of Humanity Section of our library and would read for hours. And usually during the afternoons, I hung around with writers and poets classmates in the campus field, talking about books, stories, writers and about life until the sky changed hues from psychedelic orange to dark blue and the guards had to tell us that the campus was already closed.
My best buddies Alex Capiz and Emmanuel Edu, who shocked our innocent and devout Catholic classmates with his introduction of himself during our first day in class with his audacious pronouncement that he was not a religious person with a religious name, helped me see what fate had destined of what I should be. Alex, as a brotherly act, taught me the lesson of investing in books, an inevitable part of pursuing what the future had stored for us as wannabe writers. They introduced me to the best and basic writers one ought to read: James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Luis Borges and other slew of masters in literature.
So, it was James Joyce Dubliners that I would devour in solitude, dissecting and studying the narrative mechanisms of his prose. Then came the powerful, simple prose of Hemingway overwhelming me. Though years later, when the English language remained a monster I could not tame, I spotted the cause of the infantilization of my dream short of killing the individual writer in me; it was the wrong way how to work as an apprentice under the tutelage of Hemingway. There hangs a thin line in knowing the distinction between a teacher that would address your needs from the one that could hurt you in the end.
I failed to notice that Hemingway knocked me out in my attempt to assume my fate. Hemingway is the lone writer who can send every writer of this modern time straight on the canvas during the first round. It would take several years before I could shake the beatings that I received and spar again, and undo the wrong lessons I learned.
I should have had taken a serious look on my deficiency at its first apparition so I could have had avoided the trap I walked into when Hemingway overwhelmed me with his prose. When I uttered “I also want to won” in fighting gesture to equal the feat Alex achieved in winning the top prize of Ustetika, University of Santo Tomas’ university-wide literary competition, I should by then realized that basic English grammar was on the frontline of tasks I ought to work on.
I consider this my first failure as a writer. The assumption that I was already a writer by mere wanting to be one but not taking the responsibility that the language with which I would use as the vehicle for my work was as foreign as what Chinese language is to me started the history of my writerly journey straight to the Dark Age.
The exorcism of Hemingway’s ghost from my fledging writing wisdom happened with my introduction to the works of Thomas Pynchon, and later of Italo Calvino and the Beat prose of Jack Kerouac.
The stories I wrote after my acquaintance with these writers, though mediocre and peppered with literary flaws, seemed to have opened the reservoir of creative juice I had been trying to control, and in a way set loose the rein that tied my narrative voice, freeing it to become gregarious, free-flowing, experimental and inhibited.
When I realized I wanted to be a writer, I barely knew how to write, or pour into the blank sheet of paper my thoughts.
I remember during those early days when I struggled learning how to write when I would spend long time staring at the first unfinished sentence, stuck and stammering and groping how to continue. Those days were also trying times to stay awake and avoid succumbing to the languor creeping from my feet and calves upward as the lethargy of intense staring at the white sheet of paper hypnotized me.
Several years later, with nothing to show as a proof that I had become the writer I wanted to be, I stood among young people like myself discussing during that time community organization in our place when I looked passed them, into the darkness of the evening and tried to denounce that I wanted to be one. The illusion of becoming a writer was a product of my association with those who wanted to be one, I said to myself.
A void suddenly swirled centrifugally in my chest, consuming the meaning and purpose of everything around me. I muttered: “So, what I am now?”
Then there came the quick realization, more fix and surer than before, concrete and the only thing I knew with absolute certainty. This is no more an illusion, I said to myself. There is only one thing I know what I want to be. And it is to become a writer.
No comments:
Post a Comment