“Vox Populi”

As I lay in bed last night I was struck with an idea for a book.  As with all ideas that visit in the wee hours, it was sheer brilliance.  So, as any great person does, I got to work on it right away, in my head, in bed.  Getting up would have been such a bother, and surely such a stroke of genius would stay with me until morning.  Didn’t Melville write “Moby Dick” twice?  And didn’t Joyce write “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” after tossing “Stephen Hero” into the fire?  Greatness stays with you.  Best to stay warm.

The punch line should be, of course, that I can’t remember the book.  Except that’s not true.  I do remember it, and while it’s not destined to be a classic of English literature, it’s not completely terrible.  The real trouble is something else.  In the middle of the night, I started writing the introduction to my future best-seller (it’s non-fiction) and it was rather beautiful, at least according to me, at 3 am.  But when I hit the keyboard this morning and started tapping away, I had no idea where to begin.  Or rather, I knew what to say, just not how to say it.  I was missing the voice that had sung to me so sweetly in the night.

Sing in me, muse…

As any artist knows, some times you just have to forge ahead, produce garbage, and figure it out later.  And so I did.  But every few minutes I would stop, start over, and start again.  In a completely different voice.  One version was witty, another was intellectual, another aggressive, another still was, well, I don’t know what that one was, but it will never be shared.  All of which led me to the inevitable question: Do I even have a voice?

I would like to think the answer is yes, that I sound like me, whether witty, intellectual, aggressive or that other thing, but isn’t the point to have one voice?  Perhaps it’s the actor inside, skilled in switching from character to character, but I was suddenly concerned that in my pursuit of chameleonic qualities that I’d lost… me.  The irony being, of course, that we pursue the arts to find ourselves, or at least to work out some horrible neurosis, but had the road just taken another unforeseen twist?  I thought I’d already done the work.  What happened to all that self-discovery?  All those hours of meditation?  All those books and podcasts I’d consumed?

I stopped writing for a minute.  If there’s a punch line, this is it: the book was about… you guessed it… finding yourself.

But wait, there’s more.

Punch line number two: I did.

(You might have to sit with that one for a few minutes.)

For the Mineralava Musings, this is Edoardo Ballerini.