It is 6:00 am in Baton Rouge. I woke up a half hour ago, an
hour before my alarm was set to go off.
And even that allowed for another half hour of the snooze-button dance,
staving off the persistent, droning alarm tone for a few minutes at a time
until I have to get up. In fact, it is now still an hour before I have to get
moving and even that is about an hour or two before I like to get out of bed. It
is still dark outside. I am not a morning person.
However, it doesn’t matter when I prefer to get up, whether
or not I am a fully functional human in the pre-dawn hours or what kind of
temporal person I am. I wake up early when I have to; not every job or every
day is tailor made to fit my sleep preferences. I think that God must have
created coffee for this very reason. Now wide awake with the first cup down, my
alarm set to go off soon, I find myself doing something I haven’t really done
in a long time – write. Not just write, not just the mechanical, required,
“part of my job” writing I do all the time, but rather the brand of writing
that comes with inconvenience, at the oddest of times, often in the predawn
hours, and for no apparent reason.
I think I’ve always been a writer. Not defined as “one who
writes,” but rather in a much more expressive sense, in a more instinctual, or
genetic sense, or in terms of “God-given” talent (for those so inclined). I
mean, even if the alphabet and written language did not exist, I would still be
a “writer” in much the same way musicians are always musicians and painters are
always painters and sculptors are always sculptors and actors are always actors
and any number of other artists are always artists – that art is embedded within
each of us and externally expressed somehow, someway, eventually. It
was many, many years before the writer made himself present and irrefutable. Maybe it needed to be that way; maybe he needed more to write about.
I used to do this more often. I used to give the writer free
reign to weave together whatever words came to him, to write “straight out of
my head,” so to speak. It happened whenever it happened and it was not uncommon
to find me in my darkened office when the rest of the world was asleep, lit
only by the glow of my computer screen. Then life got busy. Those moments of
free, unrestricted and uninterrupted inspiration seemed to slip away. Even the
moments such as the one I am in at this very moment were not taken as the
opportunities they were – as moments of escape, of literary freedom. Actually,
it’s is even more than that. It is pure, unadulterated, unmediated,
unconstrained, unadorned, pure freedom. But it will not last much longer.
March 11, 2014, a Tuesday this year, is about to begin. This
semester, Tuesday is one of my two “early days” every week - it usually requires
an alarm to be sure I get up in time. However, this morning the calling to begin my day
was quieter, earlier and much more insistent. This morning I could not ignore
the writer. He hasn’t written in a while. He would wait no longer.