by Anton martin Smith antonmartinsmithwrites@gmail.com or martinantonsmith@gmail.com
Do I have it?
I think that maybe I do.
This kind of thing is a kind of virus.
Hidden deeply in the psyche – like so many unrealized things.
It’s a bit like the common Cold Sore ailment.
A cold sore is of course a garden variety version of the ‘Herpes Virus’
And I am sorry to have to write that in a poem –
But then again I am a fan of the ‘San Pedro Poet of the Gutters’ – so I’ll allow it.
The Cold Sore hides behind the nerve in your jaw – so your immune system can’t kill it,
Unless it wants to risk killing the nerve and your food-chewing too.
So not being insane – the immune system lets it survive.
With the (literary version?) of the Anti-Success Virus lodged in your brain’s recesses,
You can’t kill it unless you are willing to ‘crack open your mind’.
This risks total psychic collapse as the ‘demons’ are let loose to run amok.
So your conscious mind refuses to mount a resistance to this A.S.V.
Instead it tells unhelpful (but not always fake) little stories to itself –
“Oh you’re not ready yet”
“Wait but your work is too unpolished”
“You need to wait another two years yet”
“That industry is too corrupt & facile for you”.
“Those people are nothing like you”
So you stay in the shadows year after year.
If you are lucky you allow a pinpoint of light,
To peek through the slit-closed curtains,
And it arcs across your writing room,
Just enough that one in a hundred million people walking past the window,
Kinda see half a poem in a scrunched up piece of paper by your desk.
In other words, your work ‘barely breaths on life support’ in some backwater of the internet.
Some might say to this ” But Perhaps this is just the ‘hero’s journey’ ” .
After all all those that ‘make it’ tell a similar story of struggle while being a ‘total unknown’.
But I’m not so sure these types are representative of the writers of ‘the real great stuff’.
I mean for every one of them the ones that are actually good and ‘don’t make it’ are multiplicitous.
The unseen ones ‘but for a miracle’ are truly the literary ‘black swans’.
They are the ones that when they tell their ‘how I made’ it story – you sit there literally gripping your seat.
So it’s clearly not all about ‘working hard and sticking at it’ as the deadly dull ‘Look how I made it’ types say.
I think those that ‘ conventionally make it’ are mostly ‘delusionally positive’ about their mediocre work.
These are the ones who when the tell of their ‘how I made it’ you feel queasy and tricked.
And that’s why even most the ‘classics’ are mostly total crap other than a few passages.
The really good stuff is they stuff from people who aren’t ‘delusionally positive’ about their work.
Aren’t willing to crack open their minds that whisper so seductively ‘you’re not ready yet’.
And we all know that these people like this are lost to society – unless a century later,
Someone finds that scrunched up poem by the desk and reads the other half,
Feels ‘delusionally positive’ about you and tells the whole world via a oversize trumpet.
Then and only then does a truly great book ever get born into this grey and badly written world.
Of course it would be remiss of me to not mention this:
It’s also totally true and frank to say that every bad writer forever hidden in some backwater –
Also always thinks of himself as an undiscovered literary genius –
That someone in a hundred years will discover and duly make him a member of the ‘literary immortal’.
Of course – I agree with you, statistically I am far more likely to be the latter type, than the genuine article.
But of course my brain wants to say it’s because ‘I am sensibly unwilling to crack my brain open’,
And then asks itself repeatedly:
“I wonder who will discover my brilliance and make me immortal in a centuries time?”
We are strange folk indeed.
No wonder we are so roundly rejected.
And left to our backwaters.
