I do not exist

I've had writer's block for all of 2016. I haven't written a column all year. I've been sending off old ones to the newspaper that they haven't ran before, but I'm out of them now.

I don't know what's wrong. But I'm trying to get over the hump today. I've written a little over 400 words that I don't really like and I keep needing to force myself to go on instead of walking away in disgust. The humor isn't coming out funny; it's coming out mean. And it's the tiniest of a thread of an idea to work from, but it's all I've got.

Honestly though, I feel like I've reached the point where if I don't write a column this month, I won't write one ever again. And I'm not ready to stop yet. I just wish there was more blood in this turnip.

I'm even involving a little whiskey to see if it helps.

I've got some thoughts going around and over in my head.

It started when I was thinking about songs that are sung in a foreign language, yet are still able to cause an emotional reaction when I listen to them.

That led to me making this playlist on YouTube.

Some of these songs are also available in English versions, but they don't always make me react the same way: there's this feeling of alieness I experience, like I'm somewhere else in a different world. And yet, the emotions I feel are very much of this world.

I've been thinking of ways that words and poetry cause emotional ressonance, and how (if) sometimes, the meanings of the words can detract from the visceral emotion that is trying to be conveyed.

So how do I work around that?

I keep kicking around the idea in my head of spoken poetry that does not rely on understandable words to present emotion. But there's a hinderence in using a different language - for one, I don't know any other languages, and two, the words still have meaning, even if I do not know exactly what that meaning is, and that is enough to distract.

I keep listening to the playlist over and over (and the ads every other video are pretty damn distracting, too).

I'm thinking that the way for me to approach this is using words that sound real, but aren't. Not in the same sense of Dadaism, even if it was created by my beloved Marcel Duchamp. I'm not trying to do anti-poetry in a deconstructive form through meaningless nonsense presented as art, leaving the viewer to try and determine the seriousness of the artist, as well as the intention.

So while the words will be meaningless, the emotions will not be.

That's part one.

Now, thinking even further, can the emotions of poetry be presented without using any sound at all? Stories can be, of course. (Thank you, Marcel Marseau.) But broken down to just base emotional presentation, can poetry work not only without words, but without sound at all?

Can I do a slam poem without the SLAM?

That's part two.

Part three is even more nebulous. Spoken word with only words. Turned away from the audience. The writer detached from his writing, so the audience has no preconceived notions of what will be presented.

There's a part four bubbling around in there as well, but it's barely even coelesced into even a feeling.

(How can I explore this without ripping of Laurie Anderson?)

I do know that this is not something that's going away. These alien feelings are deeply connected to my experience after surgery last year. Turns out there's even a term for it- "Pumphead". And it's more common and serious than I knew at the time. Not that I really had much of a grasp on what was going on at the time, even after I thought I had recovered.

Maybe that's where the idea of non-existing words come from. Those times when I knew that what I was saying was not matching what I was thinking, and even worse, what I was thinking wasn't matching what was really happening.

I need to explore this.