Have Written Before, Will Write Again

Been walking around lately in a state of near panic. More than a week since I last wrote. Feeling high and dry. No topic nudges nor pulls. No meme tags nor tugs.

Is this the 13th-blog block?

(Oh, Verna, how can I ever make it to 213?!)

Pining says not to worry; it happens to her, too. Toe says she felt she had hit bottom too after her No. 8 and urges me to blog about being unable to blog. Sexy mom and Rhoda react coolly, confident I should be back and writing in no time.

And here comes Ernie, my old, faithful friend Ernie, with his simple reminder: "YOU HAVE WRITTEN BEFORE, YOU WILL WRITE AGAIN."

Ernie, seasoned writer that he was, periodically suffered from writer's block too. And when that happened, all he did was: " THINK OF THE TRUEST THING I CAN THINK OF. THEN I WRITE ABOUT IT."

He makes sense, doesn't he? Good, old Ernie. My true love Ernie. Ernest Hemingway to most.

Ernie goes on to say that if we want to see things clearly, we should try going hungry. Emptiness purges the insides, opens the third eye, reveals the occult. Then floodgates open, words and ideas tumble out in torrents. -- when we run empty.

And I remember once again the poignant story of Ernie going hungry in Paris.

Ernie was then a young correspondent in France, with a wife and a baby, and was being paid for each piece he submitted. Most of the time his check got soooooo delayed, because it was war time, you see. (Which makes me imagine an overwrought postman, his mailbag a shield, zigging and zagging to avoid the crossfires.)

So sometimes, he went dry too, my Ernie. And not only in the place where the writing comes from but where we need to fill'er up with bread and meat and other gross stuff we sometimes wish we don't need.

And well, one day, with no more dollars (franks?) and cents in his pocket, and scarcely enough in the pantry to feed two, Ernie went out of his unheated, upper-floor apartment, telling Mrs. Ernie to go ahead, finish the food, because he, Ernie, had been invited out --implicitly to lunch.

On the way to where he was presumably invited, Ernie carefully avoided the sidewalk cafes Paris was known for, then as now. It wouldn't do for his already grumbling stomach, of course, to smell the scents of bread baking, coffee brewing, gravy simmering.

So Ernie, poor Ernie, took the long route to the Louvre, where he filled himself up with food -- for the soul. How much more luminous the Mona Lisa looked, he exclaimed, when viewed on an empty stomach. How much more vividly he saw colors and how much more sharply he perceived nuances behind canvas!

Satiated, Ernie came home, no longer needing to avoid the kitchen scents of roadside cafes. The gut-emptiness now forgotten, he wrote, wrote, wrote.

Now, excuse me while I drink drink drink. No lunch for me today.

Have you tried the Hemingway way?

Otherwise, what works for you on days the writing muse fails you?

(Note 1: This Hemingway vignette, recounted and paraphrased with much unpoetic license, is from the autobiographical (Paris is) A Moveable Feast.)