Grief Is Power- Essays

AN ABNORMAL STATE OF MIND

Ideas and imaginations often seem to stem from something that happens at a very subconscious level, or rather a dream-like state, where the mind is lost of the will of a body. It almost sounds impossible to me that a writer can ever face a blank page. Although the theory may completely differ from writer to writer.

The process of writing directly does not start on paper or on-screen as the very physical act of writing does not limit the art of it. For me, the process begins in the mind. The genesis of it is often looked at as abnormal, as in the complete consciousness of the person has to throw itself out of control, and reality begins to slip and bend from the prospect of something happening.

Especially in writing fiction, one can say that they have spent years planning the work of art, or processing it and preparing the sound and structure of the setting and the characters that may help run the plot and the unique drive of the story. But otherwise, there can be two ways of writing. Like this one, these essays, are written at one shot with ideas that are not worked upon, and not just imaginable, but simply an observatory result.

Such writings could be urgent, not necessarily non-fiction, sort of intervention of moments or situations where the structure of understanding how the King rules his empire dies down. That, even if is the exploration, it is much more important to happen within the given drafted situation before it closes down, regardless of the reality being in your head or in the physical world. The realm that reality exists in does not matter.

For fiction is truth. It is the methodology of being in a universe. It is a mode of seeing the world. And of course, the meaning behind the difference between truth and facts, as largely debated as to how the King has governed his empire, remains often anonymous. But nobody questions how a musician makes music. Fiction, similarly, is true in the manner a musician plucks a note that is true. But how does it occur?

It is an immersive process. It is like a deep dive into other people's minds and exploring the world through eyes that quite often do not happen to be fitting well in the universe at large. It is a mysterious mechanism, for one creates substance and life out of nothing but sheer will. The act can be like a wild leap into the ocean from a giant cliff, not knowing what is to come, just knowing that somehow, someone is going to come and some things are going to happen.

Writing, or perhaps every other art form, has a key fundamental that is to concentrate, meditate and give oneself so wholly, that one begins to lose the track of time. And so writing does not just mean physically penning down or mentally losing track of space. But rather also losing the track of the world at large: one writes when they are sleeping, leaving the food to burn on the stove, the oven overdone, letting the fire alarm go off, or cutting vegetables or doing the dishes; while talking to people, or sweeping the floors or sitting on the toilet seat

But rather, fiction does not limit the process. Such writings, the second, urgent one, often turn out to have a cooly laid out casual form. They tend to rather have a more skeletal, lean structure, not written to knock the wind out of a reader's mind, but rather to substantially, sustainably present the idea as it is. The writing tends to be more transparent in its language and structural layout.

Nevertheless, regardless of the writing style, these uncontrollable, inevitable form of telling a story or idea stems from the result of some event that has turned out to be traumatic or has left behind a trail of despair. Anything catastrophic results in a paralyzing effect that normally stuns or freezes the way things are normally supposed to happen. And often, the mind does not have enough energy to sustain the energy to write it down or think it very carefully. There is an urgent need to vomit out the after-affects of such events as they begin to claw into the everyday moments and derail the structure of not how just we live but think.

And art can be a powerful means to output that sort of grief. In situations like these, grief is the power that drives the world, where art becomes an intervention to not just understand how and where and why (the understanding should be that art is not used to get questions answered in their truest, rawest form, but instead to understand and enrich those questions) but art remains one of the greatest forms of asking questions about the world and the universes that one seems to be trapped in, or is unable to recover from. The writing seems to be unable to form itself in a tranquil motion.

Hence, the root of writing concentratedly is this fragmentation of the consciousness. Because when one is in the middle of writing, say a complete novel, one begins to lose grasp on how an entire day is laid out in its entirety, unlike how a normal person has it for them, mentally, a whole day, the way it passes. This fragmentation is not necessarily the normal state of mind if compared to the regularity of how life flows, as grief somewhat puts a pause to these mostly fleeting moments that build up to create this world the writer has a lot to talk about.

And so when life begins to break into these fragmented versions, the deterioration, although temporary, becomes an abnormal state of mind.