Jim Carroll: Inspirational, confrontational
Despite publishing two recent posts and having several ideas in my head or started, I am still suffering from a major combination of writer’s block and fear of writing and publishing something that is not even close to good or worthy of public consumption.
It is no surprise that many writers go through this, some I greatly respect and enjoy reading. There is a great two-page illustration of how it affected at least one writer, the late Jim Carroll, in his fantastic, explicit “Forced Entries, The Downtown Diaries: 1971-1973.” After becoming famous for his “The Basketball Diaries,” an award-winning look at his growing up Catholic in New York City, being a basketball wunderkind and wasting it away through heroin addiction and youth, he wrote another diary of his life as a poet, writer, junkie and scenester, including working for Andy Warhol.
He eventually went on methadone to try to detox, but due to the ugliness heroin and methadone caused, he moved to California for a while, taking lower doses of methadone and cleaning up otherwise. While it worked in several ways, he found an overpowering inability to either write or find value in any of his writing. It came up directly and as part of other thoughts, which I immediately recognized. His pangs of guilt, inadequacy and waste are also felt strongly by me, like punches to the gut.
I won’t quote it all, particularly on his difficulty of writing with pen and paper, but his typewriter description includes this truth: “Each letter typed seemed to chew up the one before it like a vicious dog so that no words could be completed…It’s all as if words, phrases, images, syntax were small glass beads from a necklace which was wrenched from some neck and spilled on the floor and down the sides of sofa cushions and armchairs and under bookshelves and maybe swallowed by the cat.” Carroll also states how he must collect them all before he can even try to rearrange/reorder any of them.
The ruefully funny conflict of trying to write about writer’s block and fear of writing but having to use someone else’s writing to do so because I can’t is not lost on me. Fuck, I have to get out of this rut, this trap, and now.
