The stuff I write about is the stuff I don’t want in my head. It’s a relief to see my fears and neuroses as abstract words trapped on a distant screen. Writing is flushing the toilet. I don’t create. I exorcise and destroy.
I am a neurosurgeon who’s been operating on his own brain for years. I’m trying to get rid of a tumor that started growing when I was born. I’m twisting my scalpel through throbbing masses of cancer cells, scraping tissue away here and there, but the tumor’s core is dense and knotted and I can’t quite get at it.
I don’t have a complete enough picture of what consumes me. I’m still reacting to things that happened years ago. I’m linking and unlinking thoughts and memories and trying to find the place where they meet.
Sometimes I see that place in a sudden, intuitive flash, but it fades before I can pin it onto the screen. What I wind up writing is imprecise, a paraphrased summary of whatever it was I saw.
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