I have spent some recent hours this evening, as is not unusual for me to do, contemplating the nature of my writing. My thoughts in this dimension have been not so much focussed on the content of my writing, and I have in fact not attended that topic at all, deeming the content, as all intention, to be ultimately all of the strictly pointless flavour, and since all pointless activity is uniform in purpose (zero, having none) it cannot be said to be exceeded or shortcome when compared to any other activity that cannot be established to have any purpose other than that which it itself propels;– no, I have not debated the content of my writing at all. Instead, it is, as it always is, the method, or style, of my writing that I have been excavating to a boundless end. For what, if anything at all, is the style of my writing?

I have convinced myself to have been eclectic in the open-mindedness I have used to approach the establishment of an answer – concrete, or perhaps a distinct, tangible silhouette – attempting in my journey a selection of principles whose forms I considered not only justified, but indeed founded in the grounds of utmost possibility for that which I know myself able to produce;– justified, in their reach, appropriateness and applicability, and possible by the fact of their own constitution, being made up not of precise and unequivocal instructions, but rather implorations to the very matter of my psyche, grounded ultimately and forevermore in my fundamental trust in my own ability to write despite any impositions I might place on myself or any liberations I might experience in the creative process I undergo whenever I choose to place the pen to the page. My approach has in this way been one that can be described as external, one that treats my mind, the host of my creation, as a black box whose contents can at best be queried and whose outputs can at best be interpreted as vague shapes, representing only shadows of the nebulous forms that expectation has nestled ever so comfortably at the resolution of my construction; and yet, driven ever solely by my desire to create these forms, it must be accepted that any such external approach can only be described as being fundamentally internal in spirit, soul, and the question it presents to my psyche as it curves each line of black ink into a word: that from looking without, prying within, I am attempting to discover myself to the perfection that is known only to those that can sit still for eternity without the need to provoke the world around them, or indeed any accessible part of themselves. A ridiculously circular exploration, truly. So ridiculous, one might see it occupy the exact length of a lifetime, and exhaust it without trouble.

Even in writing this piece that you are reading now I have underpinned every word with a driving principle – a principle which, like many of my principles upon their inception, has compelled me to write at all, and urged me with the belief that this time above all others will be replete with the feeling of accomplishment that I long for with the completion of any project, small or large, which I choose to attempt. That principle, also like all others, is simple at its core: to reach for that intuitive style which decorates my cognition, which motivates my desire to produce my thoughts at all, and not allow the inexorable assertion that will no doubt crown my completion of this piece: that everything I have written is utterly absurd, and my choice of words is abstruse with no composition or harmony between their constituents that makes a piece of writing worthy of its author’s appreciation at all. This approach is not unique at all, and I have plunged deeply into the ends of any conceivable means of expression that I can achieve with only my pen and my paper: I have attempted simplistic, literal styles, like in the final, revised version of Cute Machine, which suffer from incoherent strings of assertions that compose at best a clutter of facts that can, with some effort, be attributed an operable linearity and contiguity that results in a story; or simplistic, figurative styles, like in that story with Grace and the Moon, where the frailty of narrative attracts so strongly the feeling of dissociation that that story demanded and that few other stories can use, that it can at best be seen as a stylistic choice intended for that individual application and not an introspection into the nature of my personal style, so cannot be investigated from any place that is not within its own context; and for the more complex styles, I have given those some attention as well.

Fly in House, a story I have written some years ago now and which has served in the tetrad of short stories that has been an introduction to my writing for the greatest number of people of anything I have deemed complete, is an articulation of a habit I had held for a great part of my writing history, and is thus greatly inspired by the style – and at some belligerent points, even the exact vocabulary – of another author whose works I happened to be reading at the time of completing that particular story, being weaved from the images that had been inseminated in my subconscious by the handful of stories I had ingested from the late author Edgar Allan Poe; it is thus quite verbose, inherently obsolete in fashion, and defatigatingly demanding in lexicon – but despite those challenges, it has helped me create one of the works that I reflect on with greater pleasure than others, but only in final result, as the creative process was one that impregnated my image of the action of writing with a sense of laborious dread that specifically inspired my investigation of those simpler styles later on. The demand of preserving a sense of consistency in writing that is so heterogeneous, constantly requiring the appeasement of that quiet din at the back of my mind that seems to be forever famished for another more ergodic articulation of the same mundane concept, is a feat barely achievable to me at my peak, and eternally at a tantalising closeness when I’m in my usual form, that the action of writing becomes a ritualistic evisceration rather than a diligent effort; depriving completely the act, which ought to be an attendance to the boredom of a capricious mind, of any at all pleasure, and leaving it only with the desiccation of heart and soul that produces art in its ruthless, mercurial form. 

At two in the morning, I lie in bed, eviscerated and desiccated at writing these words; but now, allowing my suppressed feelings to float to the surface, I feel a sense of pride for having hollowed myself so. That is a feeling more than I have ever felt on the conclusion of any story.

8.X.23