Clean beginnings
A blank manuscript
To have a blank manuscript in front of you.
What a moment that would be.
You could make it so neat.
A clean beginning and a clean end.
A central theme to make it all seem right.
You picture the reader taking a moment, novel held halfway.
That moment of introspection.
That moment is what you seek.
But a blank manuscript can also be messy.
A haphazard job.
It’s not that there isn’t a guiding light. But that it fades and wavers and hides at times, and rarely does it shine fully bright.
Stories are like that. The greatest ones more so.
When we only meet each other in the middle, and depart before the end.
Can there really be a clean beginning and a clean end.
How are we to know, what the writer felt.
Can we ever know, what each story meant.
All the open possibilities, with each unwritten page.
But we are asked to follow what wisdom and dictum say.
The plot is better, the logic sound. The ending clearer, the meaning more profound.
I cannot say I follow, this dictum of the wise.
For better or worse, it has little value for the soul.
How bored would it make the reader, or even worse the writer.
When the blank manuscript you held, contains only lies.
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What is it about our inner psyche — for some more than others — that life’s inherent messiness bothers us.
Clean drawn lines and a linear path, ending in a meaningful ending — we prescribe value to this. And are upset when these arbitrary goals become unattainable.
Originality is messy. It is jarring.
That’s kinda the point.
— Ravi C.
