by Lenska
March 20, 2023
Photography: Lenska, Writing Desk: Inspiration and Sabotage.
I live enamored with writing, and I live avoiding the work of the actual act of writing as much as possible. It is tedious to articulate what I very well know cannot be fully expressed. And yes, I guess I prefer feeling more than I enjoy trying to externalize in language – it is easier, less adulterated, more immediate, more authentic. Feeling feels true. Writing can feel artificial. Perhaps that’s my dilemma. How to feel true by means of a construct, even if it is such an essential one as language. The attraction and fascination of writing is in an unfulfilled and never-ending desire to say and that desire is always ahead of me, always in the future, always as a light in the tunnel. Always an inspiration. I tend to feel at home in any unfulfilled desire and perpetual agitation more than in the act itself. The act of writing, I mean. Is that why my writing desk has no room to write on it?
Language is a gateway and a barrier. Language is an iconostasis between me and (I want to say ‘meaning’ but that’s not what I am after) – perhaps, I will say ‘truth’ of a specific instance but with a very broad appeal, as broad as the world. Iconostasis is a painted partition in Orthodox churches that points to the real action behind itself. It is a sign. Behind the iconostasis action enacts a mystery of transformation of a sign of presence into the reality of presence. I think language is an iconostasis. Reality is a kind of church and language is a symbolic screen inside it. Yes, language means to signify. But it does not mean to pretend it is the thing we are after. Is that why I love writing as much as I sabotage the act of writing?