When a block is not a block

“I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” – Samuel Beckett

This is a version of that old freewriting exercise in which, when you can’t think of anything to write, you record I can’t think of anything to write, repeatedly, until something comes to you. An exercise that never felt very helpful to me.

It took twenty years of experience with the phenomenon of writer’s “block” before I could even connect this signifier to what I was experiencing, perhaps because it’s a poor signifier. “Block” conveys an object. A six-sided one, with letters. A toy. An abecedarian. A thing you can pick up and move out of the way.

Or, say it’s a verb (which wouldn’t require the possessive, now would it?). Some thing is blocking your path. It is fixed there, a barrier between you and your ideas.

At least, the way I’d conceived of it, it meant you had no ideas. Heck, I’ve got a Reminder List on my phone of 332 ideas!

But it’s not that. What I experienced through the years of pregnancies, in which keeping my own body from succumbing to the cliff of nausea, or tending my children whose voices filled my brain, was an utter lack of thought, a lack of words altogether. A famine of images. A drought of living language. The words I had were the words everyone else had. Shoe. Dinner. Car.

And even then, sometimes the predicate wouldn’t be there, I couldn’t finish a sentence. I’d choose “bowl,” and my child would say, “You mean plate,” and I’d say, “Yes smarty, I mean plate.” (This still happens.)

***

As a child, I was captivated by the movie The Neverending Story—Atreyu and his flying dog (or dragon, whose creator could only draw dog faces?), the breaking of the fourth wall between the boy reading the story, the sudden paradigm shift into another set of rules for the world in which stories in the mind weren’t fiction—somewhere, they were real, and there was a veil that could be pierced to reveal them.

But what my imagination seemed to fixate on was the nature of The Nothing: the ambiguous black cloud, not contained in the cloud, but manifested by it, devouring space and time, and its harbinger, a great black wolf. The wolf, being bodied, being nameable, having a heart that could be pierced through at the right moment, like all monsters, was not the thing to fear. It was The Nothing, and it was coming for all of us.

It’s coming for me now, and I’m already disappearing.

***

Writer’s ____________. Writer’s ravine. Writer’s dark cloud of obscurity.

Writer’s deafness. The words exist, but you can’t hear them. You can sense them, early in the morning, the next street over, churning their engines.

Writer’s emptiness. You open the cabinet, and all that’s there is sawdust.

***

Brenda Shaughnessy in “A Poet’s Poem,” writes the word “snow” into the snow, and then says, “I can’t stand myself,” and we laugh, recognizing our own utter failure in the face of the signified. We laugh that she has still made something from her failure. (I could call it lemonade, and my inner critic battles over the reliance on cliché to shut down the openness I was just starting to achieve.)

But that’s it, isn’t it? It’s not the lack of words. Shoe. Snow. Lemons. It’s the lack of new words. The lack of good words. It’s the black wolf mocking you, slobbering on your shoes. You shouldn’t be trying. No, wrong. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

***

Writer’s whiteout. Writer’s squall.

Writer’s pit of despair in which an infinite machine is waiting to suck the remaining years of your life away and your name will belong to obscurity. (This is it, isn’t it? The fear that you yourself will disappear.)

***

Does anyone succeed at finding the right word? Is it possible? Linguistic theory tells us the signified is unreachable, inaccessible. We only have strings of signifiers to play with. Geffrey Davis recently spoke to our graduate class about his book Night Angler, about struggling for words, that we all face the inadequacy of language.

Everyone fails in this respect.

Does this knowledge make me feel better? Yes. Does it make the dark cloud dissipate, or the words come easier?

I don’t know; I’m afraid to sit down with a poem and find out.

***

Writer’s fear. Writer’s catatonic fear. Writer’s paralysis. Writer’s dark closet in which the clothes make monster shapes. But that would be something to describe, or personify.

(Oh, personification, you sophomoric poser!)

***

Writer’s malaise. Writer’s mal + ease, in which you can only write about your own bad feelings, the self-indulgent drivel you shouldn’t feel because nothing bad has actually happened to you—you have a kind spouse, a house, and three kids, and no one has died, no one wants to read a poem that is your way of dealing with your anxiety at living daily life.

Anxiety, another term which I learned–after the psychologist diagnosed my children—also applied to me, to the lifetime of an inability to wait, the need for validation, the dissatisfaction at disorder, to the stream of negative self-talk I’d learned to ignore, to wear self-assurance like a cloak. The reason I was always turning to my journal to process my thoughts, to find another way to say things, to figure out my feelings to say them better. A lifetime of writing, prompted by this need fueled by chemical imbalance—and what if it went away? What would happen to the self I created to manage it?

***

Writer’s silence.

Though silence, for me, if it’s sustained, is the oasis where I need to go to hear myself again. To have thought. To “zoom out,” as Victoria Chang writes in With My Back to the World. “A woman loses herself when she can no longer zoom out.”

I’ve just spent three weeks (including several snow days, which in Atlanta means everything shuts down) alone with my children while my spouse was out of the country. After three weeks of doing all the parent things, I felt I could no longer zoom out.

(Why was he out of the country? His estranged father died. That warrants malaise. That warrants a pit of despair.)

***

Writer’s cold shoulder. Writer’s specter. Writer’s Lord Vecna, his cold breath clouding your mind with clocks no one else can see.

Writer’s abyss. When you were eight and thought to yourself, what if there were

NOTHING. NO THING ANYWHERE . [Cue spooky music]

When you’re forty-eight and your kid asks you the same thing.

It’s that recurring dream you’d wake from as a child– the infinite black, and there are infinite numbers counting and it wants to devour you, and you wake with a scream still emerging, still unwilling to let go of the tenuous branch caught in the cliff of your chest.

***

Imposter’s empty satchel. Imposter’s carpetbag.

Elizabeth Gilbert, in Big Magic, a book that helped me re-awaken to my own creativity after my third child was born (It’s happened before, I know it can happen again!), says that we must acknowledge our fear, that it can go with us on the ride, but under no circumstances should we let the fear drive.

Somehow I’ve got the black dog in my lap, his paws are on the steering wheel. He’s waving one hand out the window, blasting Bamp Bamp Bamp Another One Bites the Dust!

***

Writer’s blackout. Writer’s erasure. Writers redacted text. There are words underneath, but you don’t have the authority to read them. They hunker down on the page like fortresses you shall not pass. Like bricks of a foreboding institution.

Like blocks?

I can’t stand myself.

***

I’ve been here before. I’ve got lists of strategies. I made one yesterday. I have tools and podcasts. Books of exercises. Poems I’ve already written that, if I slow down and pay close attention to, I can re-see, and revise.

So is the best metaphor a visual one, or aural?

Sunni Brown Wilkinson writes in Rodeo of a day she returned to language– “the eye of the eye / inside of me opens”– and I recognize this sensation: there were also the many times I became “unblocked”—I could see the world around me in a new way. I could read a book of poetry and open back up, or I’d get away for the weekend, beginning as always, with the fear of the Nothing gripping me—and as I walked, as I honed my attention to a singular thing—my breath, my body moving—a word or phrase would come, and I could remember, the world became full of living things again, miraculous in their particularity. In my particularity.

***

Emerson writes that “the eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world.”

***

In the same essay, he also says, “but yesterday I saw a dreary vacuity in this direction in which now I see so much; and a month hence, I doubt not, I shall wonder who he was that wrote so many continuous pages. Alas for this infirm faith, this will not strenuous, this vast ebb of a vast flow! I am God in nature; I am a weed by the wall.”

If I say writer’s dandelion, writer’s dog fennel, writer’s field thistle, am I not already turning toward the light?

Elizabeth Cranford Garcia is the author of Resurrected Body, recipient of Cider Press Review’s 2023 Editor’s Prize, and Stunt Double (2016), a chapbook from Finishing Line Press. Her work has or will appear in journals such as Smartish Pace, Third Coast, The Florida Review, Southern Humanities Review, Tar River Poetry, Image, RHINO, Chautauqua, Rappahannock Review, Portland Review, and CALYX, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She is an MFA student at Georgia State and mother of three. Read more at elizabethcranfordgarcia.com.