Searching for Truth

I have always found my greatest moments of inspiration during the hardest parts of my life.  I've had for the most part a very blessed life, so I don't mean great moments of despair, but sometimes just the simple ups and downs of an average life.   Looking backwards, my writing seems to explode in times of transition: bad break-ups, deaths/illnesses of loved ones, living in a foreign country, my parent's divorce.  In these moments, life seems somehow more raw, more real, and I can find comfort in the predictability of my own imagination, when the rest of the world seems completely out of my control.

In this sense, writing is a personal experience.  The characters and topics are solely of my creation and imagination; therefore, they are predictable and comforting for me.  While the rest of life spins rapidly without much of my say, the stories and situations I create through writing are mine.  For a little time, I own them and they in return own a little of me.   That is, of course, until I share them, because at that moment they also become a little of you.

It is this interaction of reader and writer, I believe, that gives us the opportunity to realize not only that we are a small part of something so much larger, but also that we are all in this together.  That deep inner connectedness of humanity is what I try desperately to express in all my writing.  The story, the plot, the words, they don't mean nearly as much to me as a writer compared to the emotional inspiration that the reader walks away with after reading.   A great poem should leave you in contemplation, or a great story should make you question something you previously believed to be true.  In this way, writing is an intellectual conversation.

It has been said that to be a true artist you must have a tortured soul, and I think that is accurate, but not necessarily in the way we assume.  We assume a tortured soul is someone who is damaged or tormented by life, but I see it instead as someone whose being is constantly fighting adversity in order to obtain a bit of truth.  Much like climbing a mountain may leave you with scrapes and cuts, searching for human understanding can leave your soul feeling much the same way.

A truly talented and great artist sees the world in a way that no one else can see it, their soul is ever searching for a truth which is impossible to either grasp or identify.  Writing is a personal experience, an intellectual conversation, and an internal struggle.  The writer embraces the suffering, the ecstasy, the inequality, the courage, and the idiosyncrasies of humanity, so that we as readers can experience the world through the eyes of another, which sometimes can see more clearly than our own.   I think that the true goal of any writer, or artist is to find truth hiding in plan sight.

The great ones (Poe, Hemingway, Austen, Morrison, etc) actually find it.




A Dream Within A Dream
Edgar Allen Poe (possibly my favorite 'tortured' soul)

Take this kiss upon the brow!

And, in parting from you now,

Thus much let me avow--

You are not wrong, who deem

That my days have been a dream;

Yet if hope has flown away

In a night, or in a day,

In a vision, or in none,

Is it therefore the less gone?

All that we see or seem

Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar

Of a surf-tormented shore,

And I hold within my hand

Grains of the golden sand--

How few! yet how they creep

Through my fingers to the deep,

While I weep--while I weep!

O God! can I not grasp

Them with a tighter clasp?

O God! can I not save

One from the pitiless wave?

Is all that we see or seem

But a dream within a dream?

Poe is a truly amazing poet.  If you like this one, which I'm sure many of you have already read, please check out some of his others: Annabel Lee,  Sonnet-To Science, The Raven.  Also, if you haven't read The Tell-Tale Heart, you must!!!