You’ve travelled in search
of answers,
ignoring all the questions
you found along the way.
I’m on the edge. Increasingly the question keeps coming back “but, why do you write?” It seemed a simple enough one at first. One that I could answer with “because I can” or “because certain things need to be said.” It’s a question that we all know that answer to because, in and of itself, it has no answer. Still, Why do you write?
If you were given a metaphor for every single piece of meat that was served in a high school ugali nyama meal, how would you use both of them? Would you spend every waking moment trying to figure out how to create more metaphors? Or, perhaps, how to increase the number of lunch times in a day? I write this piece to ask why I write this piece.
An empty cyclical path that always leads back to its tail. The beginning. Where there is a dog and another dog. Both chasing their tails and thus oblivious of each other. Ying without yang, sing without sang. The present exists in a bubble devoid of any past. As if now is new. As if now is something that has come from the big bang and the memories that we have are just things that we put in place. Are just things that we have found in place.
So why do we document them. If they don’t exist, and in not existing, we don’t exist why do we write?
The only purpose of a metaphor is to replace whatever metaphors already existed.
The only purpose of a dog is to chase its own tail, like the other dogs that came before it.
Your arms are tired
the land remains
untilled
It’s only that you consider your work digging that makes it something worth considering. But maybe it’s not and that’s the problem. Having spent all this time scooping invisible soil and planting invisible seeds you wonder why you can’t see the fruit. (Open your eyes).
I’m tired.
Honestly, I’m tired of creating, tired of writing, tired of spending every day extracting bits of myself and putting them on a piece of paper.
What did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think. I’ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.
– Jonathan Safran Foer,Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
“I have thought
and thought myself into corners made of words and nightmares
and what has it gotten me,
but more thoughts.
a currency that only buys more currency”
– Neil Hillborn, This is Not the End of the World.
There is no hope in this piece.