That Little Man

Art is a muscle. 

It's easy to say that art comes from God. It certainly feels that way if it's any good. You don't know where it came from. You sometimes read what you wrote ten years ago, and even if the good pieces are objectively... 7 out of 10? Maybe there's an occasional 8 in there if the aims stay modest enough; you're amazed they're as good as they are. They certainly don't feel as though they came out of a nonentity like you. 

You have been staring at the page for more than two months, wondering where the instant connection between brain to finger went after it wrote those two 'wrestling with genocide' posts, two of the best things you ever wrote: two of your extremely rare 8.5's. Most of what you write averages around a 5.8, and you have the extreme bad sense to make it published. Why do you publish it? It's certainly not because anybody reads it--of that there is literally twenty years of no evidence. You do it because it consoles you to know you're sufficiently talented to fart out something that, when kept sloppy and unreflective, is as good with four hours work as the average person can do with forty. 

Writing may be a miracle, but it's also a muscle, and those four hours have always exhausted you. You train that humunculus to run from head to keyboard just like you'd train your arms to lift and legs to run, and just like lifting weights, you don't lift a novel all at once. You start by lifting sentences, just the burdensome work of making sentences, one after the other, weighing the sounds of words against each other until they come together in ways that sound a little bit musical. 

Not that your music is any better than your writing, but writing is less daunting. At least with writing, you know what to do with it: where to deposit it, where to preserve it, how to keep it in a readable, not particularly attractive archive on that off chance that, one day, someone will come upon this trove of gold plated aluminum and extract enough exorbitant dust from it to call this mediocrity a writer. 

You've always chosen to hit that publish button at the first possible opportunity. It's the only way you could force yourself to keep writing. The pressure of a longer writing campaign was always too onerous. There were all those plans for novels, plays, popular histories, translations of parts of the Bible, anything that wouldn't top out around 4,000 words. You stare at the page. You stare at the screen. You stare at youtube, facebook, substack, the blogs, the times, the post, the guardian, drudge, arts and letters daily, and nothing comes. Oh the ideas most definitely come, but every reader who admires a writer knows the ability to endow thoughts with words is more elusive than they should be: it's only writers who sometimes forget it. 

You're not forgetting it right now. You're worried you'll never forget it again. 

How did you ever convince yourself to write all that shit? All those fauxp-eds, all that music writing, all those forays into other cultural and historical subjects that you told yourself you would learn much more methodically, even, god help you, political subjects, what inspired you do it? It wasn't like you got all that many writers. 

No, the point was that you were training. By lifting all that small shit, you told yourself you were getting ready for some larger work that meant more than just a piece of internet outrage of the day ephemera. You resolved writing as an every day practice back in 2011. It's now 2025. Where is the larger work? Literally nothing is stopping you from writing anything that isn't this shit nobody reads except that same homunculus, who apparently doesn't want to write anything more sustaining to the human essence than that equivalent to a tiny piece of bread. 

Maybe there's a separate homunculus in your head. A second one. A Homunculi? A Homuncules? A Homunculwo aching to get out and make his voice heard separate from the voice that has come to be known as Evan Tucker, or AC Charlap: a Buddy Love, a Ziggy Stardust, a Slim Shady, a Tony Clifton. 

How did Evan Tucker will yourself  to say things on the page? By saying things in 2012 that you yourself could never countenance saying in 2025: things you knew were shocking, things you knew would lose you friendships, things you knew would raise your adrenaline and agitate your hippocampus. 

You have lost that ability by 2025. Are you too well-adjusted to say them anymore? Doubtful. Do you believe them anymore? Did you ever?

You go through old posts and an egomaniac burns through the page who chokes your breath away. Did you really believe so many people were so bad at so many things? Well, probably, because why would you feel the need to get pen to paper unless the way things are were so very bad. Sometimes you're so embarrassed by what you wrote that you disappear it into non-publishdom, knowing that no one will miss it because everybody missed it at the time. 

Yeah, it was done in part for effect, but what amazes you is remembering who you were at the time, and knowing that even if it was discharged for effect, effect was maybe 2% of the reason. The rest of the reason is that you really did believe a lot of that. You were a highly ungenerous human being. No doubt you felt the world had been ungenerous to you, and there was a homunculus in you who felt the duty to pay it back. 

Nowadays you feel a little more generous. That was true long before you know who came into the picture, but the death of you-know-who-2 put the changes in you into perspective. Your life is different now, and a different person now puts thoughts to screen. A different person requires a different homunculus, the daemon, whatever you want to call him.

There were times in your life when you were so manic that you honestly believed that God Themself told you what to create. The 'voice' is still there, still shouting to you madly the punishments in store if you do not do according to Their bidding. Is the voice the same as the homunculus? Dear god, I hope not. But somewhere in there, there is still that little man, and he is listening, making a dossier of the world, to be filed in report after report. 

But waiting for this guy to get ready would try to patience of a turtle.