Now, I don't know how it is for the rest of you, but for me, submitting a piece of writing is really difficult. It's not the flow of ideas, or the grammar that stops me, it's my constant fight with words. When I think about something, all these ideas rush through my head, with words and phrases popping out in red, and I always think to myself "This could be great." I can visualize my paper, but what I'm visualizing isn't words on a page, I'm visualizing the feelings that those words will evoke. When I go in with such high expectations for a piece of writing, no matter how well written the paper is, it never ceases to disappoint me.
Don't get me wrong, I love words. I love everything they represent and everything they don't. When I write though, I feel like I am not giving these words the justice they deserve. I look at these amazing writers who use these words to communicate their feelings and ideas, who use these words as tools, and then look at my writing and think "There's something missing." I get the impression that my thoughts, feelings, and that sense of eviction I had earlier in my head aren't properly displayed on the paper. Because of this, turning a paper in, or showing someone my writing feels as though I am robbing the words of the praise they deserve.
As frustrating as this process is, I still love to write. I love the rush of ideas in my head, and the sense of excitement when I look at a blank paper and think of the possibilities. It's one big puzzle piece, and I love the fact that I get to mold the edges.
And when I do get it right, when those rare writings come across where I've fully explained what I'm thinking and feeling, handing it over to someone to openly judge is terrifying.
So that's why I have trouble handing in writing (or writing a blog post for that matter), and I really hope some of you can relate, or else this blog was completely pointless. Now that I'm done with my rant, I want to share with you this beautiful piece of writing that I read in my English class. Its called Everything Exists in the Word by Pablo Neruda:
… You can say anything you want, yessir, but it’s the words that sing, they soar and descend … I bow to them … l love them, I cling to them, I run them down, I bite into them, I melt them down … I love words so much … The unexpected ones … The ones I wait for greedily or stalk until, suddenly, they drop …
Vowels I love … They glitter like colored stones, they leap like silver fish, they are foam, thread, metal, dew … I run after certain words … They are so beautiful that I want to fit them all into my poem … I catch them in mid-flight, as they buzz past, I trap them, clean them, peel them. I set myself in front of the dish. They have a crystalline texture to me, vibrant, ivory, vegetable, oily, like fruit, like algae, like agates, like olives … And then I stir them, I shake them, I drink them, I gulp them down, I mash them, I garnish them, I let them go … I leave them in my poem like stalactites, like slivers of polished wood, like coals, pickings from a shipwreck, gifts from the waves …
Everything exists in the word … An idea goes through a complete change because one word shifted its place, or because another settled down like a spoiled little thing inside a phrase that was not expecting her but obeys her … They have shadow, transparence, weight, feathers, hair, and everything they gathered from so much rolling down the river, from so much wandering from country to country, from being roots so long … They are very ancient and very new … They live in the bier, hidden away, and in the budding flower.
What a great language I have, it’s a fine language we inherited from the fierce conquistadors … They strode over the giant cordilleras, over the rugged Americas, hunting for potatoes, sausages, beans, black tobacco, gold, corn, fried eggs, with a voracious appetite not found in the world since then … They swallowed up everything, religions, pyramids, tribes, idolatries just like the ones they brought along in their huge sacks …
Wherever they went, they razed the land … But words fell like pebbles out of the boots of the barbarians, out of their beards, their helmets, their horseshoes, luminous words that were left glittering here… our language. We came up losers … We came up winners … They carried off the gold and left us the gold. They carried everything off and left us everything … They left us the words.
-Habiba
