Inktober Week 3

Oct 22, 2023

One of the things I've noticed about this challenge is that in the desperation to keep up with the prompts, you start free associating. You make spontaneous connections that you don't have time to question. It becomes as much of a psychological experiment as an endeavor of creative expression.

Day 15 - “Dagger”

There’s a passage in E.M. Cioran’s book, The Trouble With Being, that I was thinking of in approaching this prompt:

I’d like to pray with dagger-words. Unfortunaetly, if you pray at all, you have to pray like everyone else. Wherein abides one of the greatest difficulties of faith.

I read it two years ago, and it’s stayed with ever since. I love the way it sounds. The way it feels. But, I don’t know what he means. Perhaps, that’s why it still lingers with me.

Philip Traylen

, I’m sure, has a better working knowledge of Cioran than I do. Perhaps I’ll have to ask him to explain it to me. But, there’s something to be said about abiding within the mystery, within the unknowning.

Day 16 - “Angel”

I reach out to books, and records, and artistry the way more well-adjusted people might phone a freind. It’s always been the work of writers, artists, poets, musicians, makers, and creators that have come to me when I’m most in need. Providing me with a sense of hope, and consolation, and belonging that nothing else is able to provide me. They are the ministering angels of my broken nature. The attendant spirits of my obliterated place.

Day 17 - “Demon”

"There is no stopping what the gods make you,“ says Marlon James, “no reshaping” the way they “shape you”. But I feel about divinity the same way I feel about whiskey. Once I was overindulgent, but now I abstain. And yet, I know all my demons by their first names. They are legion. They are many. They are me. There is no knowledge or name strong enough to exorcise them. There is no release. But, it’s in the space of writing and making things that we regularly meet for coffee. That we learn to make peace. That we become better aquainted. That we start to become friends.

Day 18 - “Saddle”

There was nothing I could think for this prompt that wasn’t ridculous or absurd. “Back in the saddle.” “Saddle-up”. Obscure references to the movie Blazing Saddles. “There are no bad ideas”, they say. I proved that expression is bullshit.

I don’t know how or why, but while I was spiraling I thought of this Robert Frost poem:

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

It’s a gorgeous poem and it’s better than anything else I was going to come up with. So, I went with it.

Day 19 - “Plump”

Despite what you might think, I am aware of how foul-mouthed I can be. It’s a foible I’m cognizant of. One that I don’t always feel bad about, but one that I am honest enough to acknowledge and recognize. I think we can both admit that up to this point in this post I’ve been well-behaved. I’ve been rather tame. You’re welcome. I hope you’ve enjoyed the reprieve. And, if you’d to like scroll ahead, I won’t be offended. You won’t hurt my feelings. Because that shit stops. Right. Fucking. Here.

"Plump”? “Plump”?! “PLUMP”?!!! What the ACTUAL FUCK?!! What the actual fuck am I supposed to do with this one?

Jason Pargin says it best in his book, John Dies at the End, when he says:

Fuck that. Fuck that idea like the fucking captain of the Thai Fuck Team fucking at the fucking Tour de Fuck.

Now, lucky for both of us, after I came down from the ecstatic state of chanting this sacred mantra, I was able to chanel my “artistic” impulses into a more positive direction. I started thinking about things that were full of potential and possibility.

Day 20 - “Frost”

How desperate do you have to be to start cannibalizing your own work? To start plagiarizing yourself? About this desperate. Twenty days into inktober and scraping through the bottom of the barrel.

I started looking through past essays to see if I had anything related to Frost, or the cold, or winter, or fucking anything. I found the passage below from a previous post that I “tried” to do something with:

"All of our creative work is our coping mechanism for life", Maria Popova says. It is the tangible means of our "self-salvation", our indomitable ongoing-ness, our obstinate resolve. “It may touch other lives, salve and save them even, but it is always at bottom a private lifeline." It’s the proof that we have survived the harshest seasons. The diminishing daylight. The shifts into the dark. That we taught our cells to tolerate the cold. That even in the slow dormancy we have never stopped working. We learned to make a flower. A candy liquid. A shielded seed desperate to be sown. Our determination to persevere.

Some ideas look only look good on paper. This one didn’t even make it that far. Let’s move on.

Day 21 - “Chains”

I wanted to offer an alternate perspective. Tried to think about a chain rection or a chain of events. You can tell I’m starting to run really low on artistic ability because my pieces are becoming increasing textual and more and more literary. The more words you hide behind, the less you have to say. Guilty, but I’m running on empty.

It’s been a tough week, but at least we’re rounding the last bend of this thing.

Cheers to the folks consistently putting out great work and inspiring me:

and

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Duane Toops

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