Full Head, Empty Page

On having no mouth but needing to scream

I am not a bored person, and certainly never lack for interesting thoughts to occupy myself. At present, I am working my way through a close and in-depth reading of C. G. Jung’s Collected Works (18 dense volumes, plus assorted miscellaneous seminars), complete with handwritten notes; writing the first tome of what I hope will be a thorough multi-volume history of the Revolutionary War; rereading the Book of Job with an assortment of medieval commentaries; and navigating a real-life career pivot. My mind is alive, teeming with ideas, and constantly spawning insights and connections between my various endeavors. It puzzles me, then, why I can never get the words down on paper for this blog.

It’s not for lack of planning. As a matter of fact, planning is the only thing I seem to be able to do when it comes to Substack. Just the Jungian readings alone have given me a good half dozen essay ideas over the past couple days, not to mention the multitude of other ideas that crowd into my brain whenever I log in to this site (these include but are not limited to a close look at the divided loyalties of the Bliss family of Cambridge, MA, during the Revolution; a polemic against non-Orthodox forms of Judaism; some pertinent reflections on Peer Gynt, a work which has deeply moved me over this past week; and an agonized essay on the identity crisis of the American Jew). But alas, only God can create by mere thought, and none of these fine ideas have gotten anywhere beyond my own brain.

It’s a funny thing. You sit down to write something good, something insightful, something that will please all these people who are following you for some curious reason, but when you reach inwards for all those fascinating ideas that are bouncing around and literally don’t let you sleep at night, they shrink away and vanish like the dew on a summer morning. What sounds in my head like ciceronian eloquence comes out in text looking more like a sophomore’s somewhat hastily cobbled together word salad; the mystical fire that grips me in my religious ecstasies hits like lukewarm water when I try to capture it in words. Longform prose I can handle, but short articles simply refuse to reveal themselves to my mind. What does appear when I try to summon the muse is either ideas that are so convoluted that they would take two weeks to write and be misunderstood anyway, or trite pablum that is indeed very true, but so commonplace as to make the reader (and author’s) lip curl with scorn that I bothered to write something so trivially obvious.

Even this essay was only able to come into existence because I sat down and said, “Enough is enough. Abraham, you’re going to embarrass yourself tonight and knock out a poorly-written article on the easiest thing possible - your inability to write anything worthwhile.” And so I did. But it’s hard to imagine this technique working to produce anything that approximates the things I want to write about, so I suppose I must content myself with this. What did I gain by writing this? I have no idea. But the words needed to come off my chest and so here they are.