I don’t get any chance writing nowadays. Right after graduation, I have been weaned from university publication like an unwilling toddler. I would toss from the bed on account of a lingering insomnia, and attempt to doodle on my tattered, dog-eared notebook with Dimples Romana – I wonder where she is. What a talent gone wasted. – on the cover. And always, I frustrate myself for stringing words that fall short in evoking emotions, stoking scholarly discourse, and/or flattering would-be critics. The last one makes me falter on scrawling further. I drop everything on what I have previously embarked and dismiss it as thoughtless thought when I think of them, the imagined critics, all hard and charging and raring to spot grammatical discrepancy, fraudulent verb tenses and stunted diction.
I ask myself one day who are these critics by the way and what the hell are they doing on my way to give life to idea in the crudest of human art, language. Sometimes they inspire in me such an awe that I would be sleepless in my nights and unproductive, the progress of the night and darkness being the most conducive to sit down and write. I am seized with what fear that could be ever conceived, them poring on my longhand, their heads drooped so low they could zoom in into and magnify the notebook leaf a million times clearer. Some other time, they lay my limbs limp, paralytic and useless for just the mere thought of it.
Some more time, they simply just sit down and wait and I simply sit down and write. However, whenever I attempt to even register a word, a duh perhaps, they spring to action and bring on all their fundamentals in criticism, proofreading, and semantics. Of course, comes the volley of necessary contingencies such as unbridled nastiness, outright meddling and perfunctory cussing.
I am really afraid that day of reckoning when my pretension will be disclosed, when my relentless feigning to scribble shall be discovered. I am frightened at the prospect of the critics drawing their index fingers all toward me, unveiling a fraud. What lust their laughter must be, cornering a poser. What mirth and glee will find them, pinning my fakeness.
To write is such a cursed, lame profession. It is certificate for muscle atrophy, except the upper extremities which does not spell much difference for health. Vigorous probably for them on inflexible typewriters, but hardly to make hefty abs. It is cursed by a perpetual mental wrestling that is as perplexing as it is clear. Bob Ong says it poignantly, may sumpa ang manunulat na sa karaniwang tao ay isang paligo lang ang katapat.
And what curse is this to confront them, the critics who whirl into frenzy at the freshest hint of blood, of weakness, of tentativeness. I retreat to the safety abyss of uncaring, of indifference to an idea that pops instantaneously and henceforth lurches implacably. Until being penned down and life breathed on them by the ink.
Today, these imagined critics have uncovered me and my pretense. I am writing, and will do so while they are itching to subject me, my sanity, my words to a radical surgery. For today I have found my bitterest critic, one whose words are as vile as mine, one whose loathing are as inspired as my revulsion. I have found the devil responsible for stoking its trident on my mind, sifting the filth from the pure, the critic that has had me in awe and wary at transgressions in words and grammar. Today.
I found myself.
