Adonis Diaries

Am I writing to enjoy reading?

And “How I learned to read” by Agnes Desarthe

The initial process of a toddler to crying, weeping, throwing tantrum and shouting monosyllables… is meant to attract attention in order to relay a disenchantment, a complaint, a doleance, a grievance….

As the toddler learns a few words, the set of crying becomes a boring method to the kid and the people around: no one is paying attention or responses are no longer that fast and empathizing…

Mother tells me that when I was about 5 year-old, I used to cry my heart out, hiding under the bed, as I heard my parents and grown ups deciding to go to a movie, and I being excluded.  Occasionally, they had to cancel their projects. Mother tells me that my crying was not of the wet kind.

Once, in an open-air movie “theater” in Africa, I saw an airplane flying in the film, and I wanted the airplane. I kept pointing my finger toward the airplane, and never desisted till they dragged me out of the theater.

It is a fluke of the living that I survived in Africa: There was no inoculation and vaccination of any diseases at the time, and didn’t catch any until I lived in Lebanon. Mother tells me that she carried me to visit a relative of father in Sikasso (Mali), and the physician met her at the door and summoned her to take me back home: The daughter of the relative had just suffered polio…

Have you ever heard a kid saying: “I am happy, satisfied, contended…?”

Most probably you heard the kid shouting: “I am hungry, thirsty, angry…”  The kid learned to talk in order to express his grievances and doleances.

The range of grievances in quality and a quantity increases with mastering the language.

All those invented new jargons by gang youth are symptoms of their inability to articulate their new grievances and sorrows to a community that does not share their life-styles…

We learn to speak so that we can transmit our grievances in the language that a community understand, otherwise, our expressions turn physically violent due to our impotency to express ourselves “civilly”.

And writing is the best means of expressing our list of doleances, as we feel a lack of quick verbal intelligence for effective communication of our miseries, or inability to associate with people and feel comfortable in gathering…

Writing becomes a means to enjoy reading, and reading more seriously and assiduously: How else can we communicate intelligently our emotions and grievances through words?

I am certain that I would enjoy fuller the previous books that I read.

It is by the writing process that I started to comprehend the emotional reality, and appreciate the emotional world in the books.

Writing was my best means to bypass the world of rational thinking and discovering the wide set of emotional intelligence.

In my case, I read a lot since I was 12 and for 4 decades, until I began to write anything outside school homework.

I guess that I was too dumb socially, shy and inarticulate to feel comfortable discussing anything in gatherings.

And I was inarticulate for lack of exercising articulation due to tacit feeling of not having reasonable cause for valid complaints: I felt neutral and had no inclination to get engaged in any activity or project…

I must have been shoving under the rug of my consciousness all the unsuspected emotional discrepancies and grievances.

The perception by others of being arrogant in my silence and mutism, as if I knew more than the assembly and refused to share what I knew or felt, isolate me even further from being invited…

Actually, my mutism reflected my ignorance of what was going on in relationships among the group, and I could not participate in the conversation…

Where to start with the zillion of questions that are needed in order to untangle the web of relationships and interrelationship, and to begin the fitting process of engaging and appreciating the concerns of people around me?

It’s a daunting task if you lack conscious emotional intelligence and are unable to believe that all the expressed emotions are real and genuine…

Writing got me engaged in becoming an accomplice and a collaborator to authors I like.

I agree with the saying: “If you are interested in a topic, write about it…” It doesn’t lend to saying that what you wrote is correct: good or bad, at least you reached a position on the topic. 

Most probably, since you were interested in a topic, you must have read about it, and the more you write, the more you read on the topic. It is a refreshing feeling to feel that you nailed down one of the zillion of mysteries…

I realized that before writing I barely seriously asked “Why” of anything and tried to resolve it.

As for the “How”, your best bet is to “doing it”. The more bruises and injuries you suffer “doing it”, the more you appreciate the value of the “How”

Note: May I suggest to have a notebook and a pen handy when you read a book? You will realize that you are communicating much better with the book and yourself as you take notes of what impresses your emotions and imagination… And the environment of reading acquires a festive feeling and joy. And if you got the habit of writing, you’ll write a couple of articles just by reading and perusing a few book strewn around you…