Every One Of These Sentences Is The Expression of an Illness

This man is my hero, Ludwig Wittgenstein.

I'm thinking of him today because he once found a copy of one his own books (the Tractatus) belonging to a friend (Moritz Schlick, the founder of the Vienna Circle), and he wrote on the flyleaf:

"Every one of these sentences is the expression of an illness."

This week, I've been writing. And last week too. My whole bloody life has been writing. And I have felt so inarticulate. I've been feeling constipated; not literally but verbally and intellectually.

I come to my blog to try and express something. I go to other people's blogs to read them and leave comments. Not much happens. A joke, a cartoon, a fragment of a song.

Somewhere inside me, I have a PhD. And once I have written it, I have a life beyond it. (Go me!) Today, every one of my sentences feels like the expression of an illness.

I first discovered I could write when I was six years old. Until then, I'd read books, devoured them avidly.
Is there anything left?
Maybe steak and eggs?
Waking up to washing up
Making up your bed
Lazy days
My razor blade
Could use a better edge.

Books were wonderful things.

As soon as I had a school teacher who encouraged me to write, I started telling stories, and didn't want to stop.

But that was then.

I've been talking to my Friendly Neighbourhood Wise Woman about the hell of writing for almost a year.

A couple of weeks ago, she suggested that maybe "constipation" wasn't the right medical metaphor for what I'm doing.

She thinks I am giving birth to myself.
Will we still be writing
In approaching years?
Stifling yawns on Sundays
As the weekends disappear?


Ummmm...

Right...

Okay.
I think I can work on that...


We could stretch our legs
If we`d half a mind
But don`t disturb us
If you hear us trying
To instigate the structure
Of another line or two
Cause writing`s lighting up
And I like life enough
To see it through

ELTON JOHN
& BERNIE TAUPIN