On "In Pursuit of Wind"

July 1, 2012

Time flies, even if you're not having fun. I suppose I try to make the best of it, and it could be much, much worse. Waiting is never fun, though, especially if you don't know if what you're waiting for will ever arrive.

It is already July and we are moving into the heights of summer. Imagination has left me, so instead of imagining new worlds, I go back to old ones. Since I left Sibyl Fried for good, it has been six years. But now I can finally rip her apart like I need to.

Her madness is no longer my own. I have expunged that voice from my head and I no longer have to know every breath nor every moment and how they feel to someone who is not me. There are so many wavelengths of Sibyl Fried that I glossed over and shouldn't have, and there are so many more that I described too much.

But writing is never easy. Writing is always an exercise in laying what is most private within you bare to the world's criticism - and worse: your own. Of course, I am no longer the teenager who wrote her, who wrote her children, who wrote their madness, their violence, their incestuous, narcissistic love -- who wrote impossibilities and the small patch out of a tapestry of time. But that teenager was me once, and she has grown into this.

At twenty-five, almost, her dreams both deferred and come-true.

So I rip her apart and build her back up again. Perfection can never be achieved, but you can come close. I've ripped whole paragraphs out. And know i'll write more to erase her esoteric rambling so that her profundity can be understood. This comprehension is more important than flowery language.

They tell you from the instant you realize you're an artist that one of the most important things you can ever do is just let go. Sometimes it takes years because letting go feels like nothing less than slashing and burning yourself.