Inspiration is Comming Close

I've e-mails to answer sitting in my mailbox, jobs to tackle piled on my work tray, letters to read and answer neatly lined up in my desk, and I'm not getting there yet. A letter I've been waiting for, which I finally received and read and to which I still have to reply is holding me back so far. It's a letter to my friend Hélène, from Belgium, with whom our correspondence flows partly in French, partly in Spanish. It's the French, naturally, what holds me back a bit, as I'm just not sure of it, it doesn't flow (at the begining) easy enough for me to feel comfortable, though as I know, just as being in Paris, once I'm there it's like I can't but think and speak and hear French all over. How long has it been since the last time I was in Paris? Too long for my soul, long enough to ache for it again.

But this is not about Paris, or French. This is about what's coming, and what's coming is October. Yes that month where I hit an emotional and inspirational peak, sort of an inverted Sebastian Venable, where is not three months of summer that feed the yearly poem that takes nine months to be written, but in my case October is the Peak Month, when by some reason I feel more inspired, almost assaulted by inspiration. The rest of the year I can write - though it has been a while since I wrote anything - but October is like the one month a year when the onslaught of the imagery and that pepperminty feeling sliding ribbons inside me is far stronger.

This month I wish to take the Muse's hand, hold to it and give up to her, follow her lead and write the sense away. A few projects are waiting there to be written, to be continued, to be followed and finished, and they have started leaking their fingers into the idle moments of my day. The scenes flutter again before my eyes, and I see over and over elements that should be written down in this or that work. They crowd my head, sweet and intoxicating, making me wish to be able to pick the right book and read more about them... but the book hasn't been written yet.

Am I an artist? I'm not fully conscious about it. Not now, at least. Am I a writer? Yes, I think so. I wonder sometimes what makes writers write. Do they really have something to say? It could be. For me, the things I have to say, I say through blogs and letters and my journal. The things I write, are basically the books I want to read, the stories I crave to find but haven't found so far. Does that make me an artist? It feels weird to think so, because I "craft" up for myself - sometimes on demand for my friends - but my pen writes for me. It's like the artist should have sex, please someone else aside from himself, but what I do feels more like masturbation: it's not for anyone else, isn't for a market or an audience, but to sate in myself what the broad market fails to provide for me.

Artist or not, October is coming down on me and soon I'll be enraptured by extasis and inspiration.