How can my Muse want subject to invent,
While thou dost breathe, that pour'st into my verse
Thine own sweet argument, too excellent
For every vulgar paper to rehearse?
O, give thyself the thanks, if aught in me
Worthy perusal stand against thy sight;
For who's so dumb that cannot write to thee,
When thou thyself dost give invention light?
Be thou the tenth Muse, ten times more in worth
Than those old nine which rhymers invocate;
And he that calls on thee, let him bring forth
Eternal numbers to outlive long date.
If my slight Muse do please these curious days,
The pain be mine, but thine shall be the praise.

-sonnet 38

 

I’m the notes Mahler couldn’t find. I’m the feeling you get at the end of the Raymond Carver short story, the middle of the Eric Dolphy song, the beginning of the Samuel Beckett play. I’m the emotion you instantly recognize within Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants." I’m the emotion you can’t find when you ask yourself about September 11th, 2001.

 

For the past few nights I’ve been having a series of really vivid, really intense dreams. The images I that can recall deal with fights for survival, battles against inexplainable monsters, and running for my life. I’ve been the captain of a ship, a man on the street, I’ve been myself. Stranger still is the fact that I’ve awakened from each of these dreams at some point during the night, shaken from slumber by my brain’s burning need to know if these scenarios were real or not.

 

It's always the same -- I find myself sitting on the edge of the bed, running my hands through my hair. There are no dinosaurs, squalls, or car accidents in the bedroom; only shadows of dirty clothes hanging on the bedpost caught by the green light of the alarm clock display.

 

I sit there feeling a little embarrassed as I try to compile it all into something linear, something that I can look at from front to back. The images are fresh, the ideas are clear, but there’s something about it I can’t put together. Something that ties everything together is just out of my grasp.

 

I’m in a large house, I’m locking the doors. A Tyrannosaurus is outside, looking through the windows for movement. I know that I have to get upstairs, I know that I have to turn the computer off.

 

I’m shutting the machine down. It’s taking too long.. I know I’ve been standing here too long.. I need to go.

 

The window shatters.

 

It’s jumbled and broken, it’s fragmented and over exposed. Why did I need to shut the computer off? I sit there on the side of the bed, my eyes growing accustomed to the darkness. The more I look around, the more I recognize objects in the room. It’s like a fog is lifting, like I’m able to finally see the patterns within the Mandelbrot set.

 

But then I realize that I know the objects in the room because I’ve seen them with the lights on. After a moment it becomes clear that I’m simply integrating my memory of what’s in the room with the shadows I see on the walls, on top of the dresser, hanging on the hooks on the closet door.

 

I suddenly realize that I can’t see in the dark. I realize that I’m just recalling the light.

 

It’s that feeling you get when you’re watching an episode of a television show you really like, the one where the hero has to put together all these weird clues and coincidences to try to figure out how who the villain is. It’s the sensation you get when you think to yourself, "I don’t remember this episode.. it must be one I’ve never seen before," and you start to pay closer attention, only to realize a moment before the climax of the story that you actually have seen this episode before – and yes, you already know who the killer is.

 

I don’t know why, but when that happens to me, I feel disappointed. 

 

I’ve been thinking about music a lot lately. I’ve been feeling this pull to play guitar; to choose notes close to each other on the fretboard and string them into chords. I’ve been listening to music that makes me want to play guitar, music that I haven’t expected. There’s a local band called Misery Head that I came across recently. A good band, very polished. I didn’t expect to like their energy, but they write the kind of tunes that tend to get stuck in your head, the kind that you want to hear more than once.

 

I downloaded some songs from their website, and found myself listening to them over and over. On the one hand, they are a pretty straightforward rock band -- drawing heavily (sometimes too heavily) from groups like the deftones. But on the other, I find myself drawn to the way the guitar player sounds. He’s got a real knack for playing within the context of the songs. There’s something about the tone that he gets from his instrument, something about the way that he moves in and out of the lyrics, finding the spaces to be complimentary to the singer, as well as the spots to be aggressive and take the wheel.

 

He’s not the greatest guitar player I’ve ever heard, but he has something that I want so badly from my own playing, something that sometimes I think I lack. He has the ability to make his instrument function within the song, to have his part be integral enough that you can’t imagine the song without it, but you can’t remember it completely on it’s own. I could learn the parts and the progressions of these songs easily, but if I played these songs I know that they would sound different somehow.

 

It’s not that I’m incapable of playing the songs correctly, or with the right sense of emotion and feel, but that my approach to playing, my interpretation of how the notes are expressed is different from his. It’s the same feeling I get when I listen to Sade’s band. They’re so restrained, so relaxed into what they’re doing. I know the songs by heart, but I also know that I can’t play them the same way.

 

I think in the end it’s good that I have to be my own artist, that I can’t simply morph into something else without a glitch.

 

But at the same time it has a tendency to catch up with me in harsh moments; it has a tendency to find me sitting on the edge of the bed with a hand in my hair. It finds me at the keyboard of a computer, trying to find the words to recreate the visions that were so powerful to me that I had to wake myself up to confirm that they weren’t actually happening to me.

 

The visions that are so vivid that they actually make me hesitate when I go to open the window shade to assure myself that there isn’t a dinosaur outside.

 

I mean, of course there's not a tyrannosaurus out there. I know that.

 

But if you were to see my hands sometimes when I move the curtains back, you might start to doubt yourself too.

 

So why can’t I remember it clearly when I sit down to write?

 

There have been other stories, other dreams that I’ve had. I’ve been there in my sleep, experiencing these battles between the various goods and evils that my subconscious comes up with, secretly knowing that when I wake up in the morning I am going to have all the tools I will need to write a fantastic story. A story that’s all mine, all created within my imagination.

 

But the next day (and sometimes the same night) when I sit down to put the images to the page, it’s like I’m trying to play that other guy’s guitar parts again. The pictures are right, but there’s something missing. Something intangible that I can’t seem to find the right way to express.

 

It’s like the me in my dreams plays my songs differently than I do, and no matter how hard I try to match his inflections, it comes off sounding like a cheap facsimile

 

That’s where I’ve been at lately. I’ve been at the keyboard, 2 in the morning with words in my mind’s eye that simply will not come out of my fingers onto the screen. I have this story idea that I can see clearly. But no matter what I try, I cannot put the words to it.

 

For example, I had this great idea recently to "re-work" the Battle Royale scene from Ralph Ellison’s "Invisible Man" using Muslim characters instead of African Americans. I actually had several lines of dialogue dancing around in my head, and at one point even consulted my brother-in-law (who wrote his thesis about the book) about it. He was all over the idea, and we talked into the night about possible angles to take with it.

 

I re-read huge chunks of the book, sought out critical essays about it on the web. But when I sat down to actually write it down, it was like I was trying to recall the features on a stranger’s face for a sketch artist.

Frustrating.

It’s just so damn frustrating.

 

I get writers block now and then. Sometimes I get just plain lazy and just don’t want to write. But every now and then I get to a point where I am loaded with inspiration but stymied with my own ability to translate myself.

 

As a student of writing, there are ways I’ve been taught to deal with this – free-write, re-write, brainstorm, read, go bake a cake (yeah, that helped out a ton), get away from it, come back to it, approach it from a different angle, forget it completely and move on to something else. The usual FSU Creative Writing department cure for a bad case of writer’s block was to drive over to Buffalo’s Wings and Rings and knock back a few rounds until the inspiration either spills out of you or withers into drunken renditions of songs by Bob Marley.

 

But they closed Buffalo’s down a long time ago...

 

So far I haven’t found a place in Jacksonville that has the right combinations of acoustics for an impromptu rendition of "No Woman No Cry." But I will be the first to admit that I'm not looking quite as hard for it as I should be.

 

So instead I sit here at the keyboard, starting down roads of promise only to retreat from them a moment later using the backspace key.

 

I can see the story in my mind. I can see it, right there...

 

Why can’t I bring it out of myself?  

  

"It seems that the Ninth is a limit. He who wants to go beyond it must pass away. It seems as if something might be imparted to us in the Tenth, for which we are not ready."

- Arnold Schoenberg, 1912

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