Found Art

I was looking back through my files, and this is what I came across. I know reprinting old stuff is a copout, and I have been neglecting this column -- but no apologies; I have been working on my book.

Enjoy this, anyway.


Writer's Block

He sat down with a grunt, his face set in serious lines: a frown on his lips, a crease between his brows. He leaned over and stabbed the "On" button with one finger. Arms crossed over his chest, he waited for the computer to warm up. His foot tapped. He muttered under his breath. Finally, he rolled his eyes; but nothing worked. The computer needed exactly 89 seconds to start up and be ready to accept commands; it took exactly 89 seconds to go through this process, despite his mental commands for it to hurry the hell up.
When it was ready, he opened the word processor -- the few seconds that took to begin merited another eye-roll, that most common and thus least effective of facial calisthenics (imagine how toned must be the muscles that roll our eyes in irritation, in exasperation, in solemn prayer for divine intervention) -- and then he cracked his knuckles and said, "Okay!" He said it forcefully. With bold, heavy keystrokes, he started typing, the letters flying from his fingers like sparks from a sparkler --
"No, that's no good," he muttered, and the delete key was rapidly pounded. He took a deep breath, and then his fingers struck the keys again, the letters falling like drops of rain --
He paused. "Nah -- too pretty." Again, the delete key suffered a rapid-fire assault. He pounded his fist on his forehead, trying to beat it out of himself.
Now the words shot like bullets, flew like gravel from under a spinning tire, launched like a swarm of locusts after they have cleared a field of life-giving grain down to the cold and barren dust --
"Screw it," he said through gritted teeth, and turned the machine off. He stood, pushing the chair back angrily so that it almost fell, catching it at the last second with an oath. He stomped from the room.

He sat down with a sigh. For thirty seconds, that was his only motion -- the rolling eyeballs were stilled, the face blanked by melancholy. He blinked, and sighed again. He leaned over, sighed, and pushed the "On" button, and then his face fell back into its previous position, staring at the smallest, loneliest dot on the wall as the computer went through its warmup procedure. This time the computer started up without any mental encouragement; if anything, his thoughts tried to slow it down, to drag it out so that it would be more appropriate to how he felt: the world should grind slowly to a squealing halt for moods such as this one. It is so much harder to be still, let alone feel that glorious stagnation that is ennui, when people keep moving and birds keep flying and the sun shines happily down. The only saving grace is that the effort required to maintain a good blue funk simply adds depth to it, and perhaps a sprinkling of rage. Like cinnamon.
When the machine was ready, he languidly clicked on the program icon, and then, with yet another sigh, he started typing. He got one word out, and then erased it, with a sigh. Then a different word, half deleted for a typo, then fully deleted with a sigh.
He stared at his wall-spot.
Finally he began, and managed to get through a full sentence. He sighed, and then stared again. He typed another sentence, but the words were hard to find. It felt as though he were digging through mud, mud thick and black as molasses --
"No. Molasses is sweet." He sighed.
The words dripped from him like moisture exuded by dank fungus that grows in the wall of a basement --
"Not enough."
-- like fungus that grows inside a crypt, a crypt warmed by the sun outside and by the heat of decomposition inside, the final heat of one's last dive into entropy --
"Too much."
The words drooped pendulously like cold motor oil, black and heavy with dirt and use, the connection between his mind and the screen lengthening, attenuating, stretching, stretching -- until finally it snapped, and the sentence plopped to the screen, splattering the air with the smell and feel of ancient and purulent filth.
He rubbed his eyes. He took a deep breath and held it, and then let it out. He looked at what he had written, and then sighed again. "I keep this up, I'm going to strangle myself with the mouse cord," he said. The image pulled a slight laugh, more of a sharp exhale through the nose, but it was enough; the melancholy dried up and faded away. He glanced at the clock in the corner of the screen; his favorite cartoon would be playing on one of the nostalgia channels in a few minutes.
He turned the computer off and hauled himself out of his chair. He walked slowly out of the room, his steps hastening slightly as he remembered that he still had a packet of microwave popcorn in the cupboard.

He sat down carefully, pressed the "On" button without looking at it. He drummed his fingers on the desktop, but with rhythm, not with annoyance. He had the strangest expression on his face: halfway between distraction and eager anticipation, as if he couldn't wait for something to happen, but also couldn't focus on what was coming because he had a tickle somewhere, or an itch; perhaps he was going to sneeze. The computer warmed up, and slowly the anticipation overcame the distraction: by the time the screen glowed with its ready and welcoming light, he was grinning, and there was a sparkle in his eyes, an excitement that would have been contagious had anyone been there to see it. The grin spread into a full smile and he nodded to himself. He clicked on the word processor with quick fingers, and then drummed the rhythm again, louder this time, and with a tiny flourish at the end. When the word processor was ready, he took a moment to gather himself, and then he began.
The words jumped and leaped and danced, alive at last, joyous as they should be, because even if the meaning of the words is fraught with importance and permanence and massy truth, the words themselves are light as air -- nothing but squiggles on the page, easily made, easily destroyed. They are air, for what are words on paper but captured sounds? And what are sounds but motes and flecks, vibrations dancing in the air like rainbows from a prism, gone as quickly as time itself, and leaving as little behind? And yet how necessary to us, as necessary as air: the stuff of life itself. They are a flash of light, and perhaps that flash can be captured in a memory, but memory will never be able to recreate that moment of light, that instant of sound; this is what grants these ephemeral things their beauty, and it is that beauty, the perfection of those moments, that we try to recapture, to recreate, to live again and again. But how foolish that is! It is the very fact that magic cannot be reproduced that gives it its power, its glory: when something can be repeated and remade over and over, then it is nothing but science and industry. Magic is here, and it is gone, borne away on the wings of a falcon soaring.
He sat back for a moment, his eyes flickering over what was splashed in bright and vibrant colors across the screen. "Wow," he breathed. "Wow." He smiled as he read it, knowing even as he did so that the first reading was never as good as the actual creation, that the second reading was worse than the first. His fingers flew to the keys as he wrote that in, because it fit, it was what he meant to say: the magic is in the moment of creation, that first encounter, and nowhere else. That magic can be spread, like yawns, to another person, and another and another and another -- but for each of us, with each magical experience, it comes only once. Once you have seen a trick the first time, the second time around you don't see the trick -- you try to see what is behind it. And that can be good, too -- but it isn't magic.
He laughed, and suddenly he stood up and moved out of the room, his steps light and airy, almost running, almost dancing. He left the computer on when he left, his words shining on the screen like beacons, asking another pair of eyes, another soul, to come and read them, to feel what he had felt that one time he had written them, asking someone else to tell him that this time his words were magic -- he could not know it, himself, not the second time through.
A tiny head popped up out of the keyboard, appearing between the Q and W. It looked around at the empty room, and then up at the screen, which seemed to be the size of a mountain. Two eyes, as small as a single speck of dust, raced across the lines on the screen, and then a tiny mouth like a dash curved into a smile that could be called wide, had not the head been so small. The creature spoke out of the corner of that tiny smiling mouth, its voice like the squeak of unoiled hinges on a mouse's door.
"Hey! Erdgy!"
A second tiny head, shaped just as the first but this one was of a blue hue, whereas the Q-W head was orange, appeared between the L and the K. "What?" it squeaked. It blinked rapidly, as if it had just woken up, and then seemed to notice the screen: its eyes focused, and ran across the letters glowing quietly there. Then this face, too, was creased by a smile.
"He did it!" the blue head said. "He actually got him back!"
The first head nodded. It looked at the words again, read them again; even as the magic faded, he could feel a spark of joy left behind -- the sign of true wonder. "Yeah, Frmagump did it, all right. I wonder how he got him to remember?" The head turned to look at the blue one. "You made him sad, right?"
The blue head nodded. "Didn't work, though."
The orange head shook from side to side. "Yeah, angry didn't work either. I thought it would -- he was angry last time he did it right." It sighed. Then it looked back at the screen, and once again the smile creased its tiny mouth. "Well, however that little gremlin did it, he did the right thing."
The blue head, Erdgy, finished reading the screen for the second time, feeling the same joy and knowing the same wonder as the orange head had felt. Erdgy raised its arms, leaning one on the K key and resting the weight of his tiny blue head on his tiny blue fist. "He told me he was going to sing to him," he said distractedly.
An orange hand appeared and smacked the orange forehead. "Of course! Why didn't we think of that?" Then a new thought popped, and the orange head (whose name was Pittshogarenthianaf'plonizawontik, which just goes to show why Erdgy had not called him by name) turned to Erdgy and asked the question he had just thought of.
"What did he sing?"
Just then the man came back into the room, He was wearing a top hat and a black cloak with red silk lining; other than the plaid pajamas he wore underneath, and the fuzzy oversized slippers on his feet, he looked just like a magician on a stage. The two heads popped back between the keys, vanishing quick as thought.
Under his breath, the man was humming; if someone had been looking, they might have seen the tiniest hint of a small green head, no bigger than the head of a pin, hidden in the thatch of hair just above his left ear. The head was bobbing along to the beat of the tune the man was humming, and the head was grinning.
"Pink elephants on parade, bum, bum, bum, ba-dee-dee-dum . . ."
The man sat down at the computer, throwing the cloak back behind him with a flourish. Without reading what was on the screen, he began tapping the keys, and the words flew from him like clouds driven by a warm wind, splashing out like drops of salt spray from the prow of a ship as it raced the waves. And as he wrote, he sang, and he felt the joy that we can only reach when we do not think. And though he could not quite hear it over the sound of his own singing, over the sound of his fingers dancing across the keys, three tiny voices sang along, in miniscule three-part harmony, a song about the absurd dreams of an imaginary elephant that could do what no elephant can do.
And on the screen, his words were magic.