It is a pointed fact of my life, and especially more so the adult portion of it that I like to write. That I enjoy writing. Perhaps it is only some sense of the reportorial, or the absurd, or the necessity to report the dull, crazy, wrong, unjust and absurd, or to tell the truth, or tell of my life, or tell stories, or to stroke my ego vaingloriously or all or none of that, but not only do I love to write, but I wish to and want to on a diurnal basis. That is, a quotidian schedule...that is, daily. And there is a certain flexibility there, among the path and the field of inflexibility, for I am an undisciplined, free one, and writing, while fun, seems to me, even at the best of times, to be work and imprisonment and discipline....all things which my worship of truest and fullest freeness rebel against and cringe at.
You see, the flexibility of writing is dominated by, simultaneously, the very inflexibility of the exact same thing.
I would wager the gross national product of nations that many people do not notice nor realize this abundantly true fact.
Though this may seem to have nothing whatsoever to do with this or anything (so that it is in fact apropos of nothing), I have noticed an odd, silly, absurdist, lighthearted wit present at times in the body of Barbara W. Tuchman's "The Guns of August" a book about the prehistory/causes, outbreak and first month of battle of the First World War. It is strange that sometimes she describes something or someone (mostly someone) in this off-color, silly way that, at the very least, generates a sly smile on the part of the reader...certainly I have smiled, if not chuckled outright at these little unexpected witticisms.
Yet, the work is also deadly serious, as it should be, given it's intense subject manner...yet even at times the grotesque horrors of war she mocks, and does so in such a way to make a true sarcastic and lover of comedy proud....it is her style, in fact, that I hope to one day employ in a historical/biographical or autobiographical or essayistic work of my own, for it is an interesting device, and it makes the work more intriguing, more thought-provoking, relatable and palatable, yet she also describes scenes of carnage, warfare and artillery bombardment with an intensity and sangfroid that bring you right there, right to the scene of battle, and you feel as if you are witnessing it and a part of it.
It's amazing, truly, and though I have yet to read many works of history, especially military/political history, I would have to say that her unique style of pointed truth is among my favorite of this genre.
Still, that has very little to do with the point that I was laboring to make about diurnal/quotidian writing, something which, other than in correspondence or electronic messaging, I do not live up to. With regard to essays, history, opinion, story, fact, truth, fakery, comedy, tragedy, parody and everything in between (including even poetry) I do not always live by the writer's essential discipline of quotidian labor.....yet, what with my job's sudden reduction in not only the hours but the days I work, I am not living by the discipline or code of the laborer's quotidian sense of labor, either! Though that is a joke, it is true....and as good a place as any to end this oddity of mine.
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