The page is a void, not because it lacks meaning, but because it hoards so many unuttered meanings that to pin one down with ink is to betray the shimmering ambiguity of all the rest. Writing with silent emptiness is the challenge, the immense, prickly void that demands to be trespassed by words, even when every word is an insult to the deep, terrifying hush that precedes it. Sometimes the writer imagines himself as a diver in a black ocean, wishing only to return to the surface, to the native airless quiet, but compelled downward by the pressure of expectation, the possibility of finding some luminous wreckage in the depths.

What is the point of writing at all, when each phrase is only a repetition, a translation into a lesser medium? It is a question that haunts even the most self-assured stylists, those who have spent decades training their voices to sound like no one else’s, only to hear the echo of their own doubts in every line. The possibility of invention, of revelation, is a cruel mirage; any attempt to make language new is an act of violence against the invisible architecture of meaning that supports all human interaction. Still, the compulsion to write persists, as inexorable and as inexplicable as hunger.

No one knows where this urge comes from, or why it is so often tinged with shame. Perhaps it is a vestige of the magical thinking of childhood, the belief that naming something is to summon it into reality, to change the world through sheer force of narrative. Or maybe it is a kind of penance, a way of paying back the debt incurred by all the unspoken, unreconciled moments that fill a life. At any rate, the blank page waits, and the hand moves, and the ancient drama of articulation and erasure resumes.

And so, with every sentence, the world is made and unmade, spoken and silenced, a dream of communion that can never quite be fulfilled…

© KD.W.Heim