False Start

“Interviewer: How do you recognize a false start? Does it give you a particular feeling?

“Elif Batuman: Yeah, but not right away. I think any start has to be a false start because really there’s no way to start. You just have to force yourself to sit down and turn off the quality censor. And you have to keep the censor off, or you start second-guessing every other sentence.”

is it age,
or is it experience?
it’s a welding of both,
i surmise, that false starts
in writing,
falseness in relationships,
falseness in  day-to-day-to-day transactions
are recognizable in an instance
by gut feel, 
by instinct & 
by intuition.

the devil has a handsome face,
our poet mila aguilar once observed.
indeed he does, 
he even has the temerity
to invoke the triune god’s words
of sacramental forgiveness
& reconciliation
when obvious wrongs—
the censoring of truth found in the
simplest public documents, 
the stifling of freedom to protest, 
dismissed as outbursts of passion,
the unjust withholding of 
of the working lot's due—
had been done.

but such is life in my country, 
mr batuman, 
where evil & darkness prosper merrily
because they hide behind
the shining cloaks & bejewelled 
miens of the well-meaning,
the well-intentioned
who enjoy nothing more
than the powerful high
of herding innocent others
to the burning pathways
of their garbage-pit hell.

--Babeth Lolarga
Dec. 1, 2012
6:47 a.m.

 Source of quote: http://www.theparisreview.org/miscellaneous/6184/from-the-proceedings-of-the-first-annual-norwegian-american-literary-festival-the-editors?utm_source=newsletterwinter2012issue&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Oslo

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