And so I labor under uncertainty here at the keyboard, torn between describing this dark night of the soul (ah, you should read those discards—very moving, very clever) and trying to use words to nudge myself toward the light, between baring my sorry soul and trying to bear my spirits upwards, all the while thinking that the truly compassionate thing is simply not to inflict myself on anyone. 

Ironic that a wordsmith would be without words, though. But understandable, too: I’ve been inundated with words lately, it seems, and rather than being instruments of craft used to shape objects of Truth and Beauty (one and the same, as we know), they have been hammers beating constantly, not precisely like the cartoon hammer in the old Excedrin commercials, but the powerful mallet of the blacksmith beating on my anvil head.

No, this constant flow of words has been like the water torture our region has undergone: a constant drip alternating with frequent torrents, that represents neither the wellspring of life nor the creative pool of the imagination but a flood of dirty water that overruns the land and muddies everything it touches.

Much of what I’ve been writing and editing lately has been test items, which are boring (I like to tell stories; test items have no stories) and made difficult when the client wants a chunk of the multiple-choice battery to represent higher-order thinking skills, which (sorry) multiple-choice items are not suited for. But that is beside the point.

The point, an ironic one, is that crafting multiple-choice test items means writing solid distractors—the incorrect answer options that are somewhat plausible, of relatively equal length, not mutually contradictory (that’s a tipoff), and parallel in construction.

Distractors. Seems fitting, no? Focus on distractors has distracted me from my real passion, which is trying to use words to express . . . to express . . . ah, what? I cannot finish the sentence.

Which reveals the nub of the problem: for all the distractedness has left me at sea—adrift in the boundless Sargasso Sea, clammed up by clinging seaweed that chokes down words, becalmed (but not calm) by the airless Doldrums, the absence of circulating air preventing the giving of voice. 

Or is it the airiness inside the head, the echoing of a chill wind within vast empty spaces? 

We’re not talking writer’s block here. We’re talking nothing to say, no worthy utterance to offer, udders utterly empty of verbal sustenance, of wisdom, even of humor. The valley of dry bones rattles in my head, and bone on bone, without the cartilage cushion, makes for halting and painful movement. 

My legs are cramped each night by sitting so many hours at the desk. My mind is cramped each night by so many hours of using words for base purposes. Perhaps that is my affliction—the feeling that I’ve been forced to defile the Holy of Holies by using words as bludgeons to sunder Those Who Know the Answers from Those Who Are in the Dark, deemed not worthy by those who believe in assessments as the be-all of education, when in truth those cast asunder are the children of God as thoroughly as the worshippers of tests (perhaps more so) who just maybe (ya think?) need to have their understanding assessed differently—or who need to have their curiosity provoked more creatively in the first place. 

But it’s wrong to blame it all on assessments, however damnable they are. No, the problem is that I’m afraid that actually beginning to write will open the floodgates of feelings and thoughts only to find that rather than holding the healthy waters of a reservoir, they contain a cesspool. 

No, the problem is that I’m tired of wallowing in that stagnant, sluggish, diseased muck and wish to drink from, but have not yet reached, the refreshing water of the oasis—and, indeed, it seems far beyond the most distant horizon.  

Until I am cooled by the shade of the sheltering palms, until I can rest alongside the life-giving waters, until I can find voice in praise even of the stark beauty of the dunes (for Beauty is Truth), what can I say? 

Words © 2011 AtHome Pilgrim.

All Rights Reserved.