talent

I'm currently reading Stephen King's 'The Dark Tower VII' for the third or fourth time. It's 1,050 pages long, and a third of the way through, on page 349 to be exact, there's a statement that I love. Ted Brautigan was explaining how he was using telepathy.

"Because talent won't be quiet, doesn't know how to be quiet," he said. "Whether it's a talent for safe-cracking, thought-reading, or dividing ten-digit numbers in your head, it screams to be used. It never shuts up. It'll wake you up in the middle of your tiredest night, screaming, 'Use me, use me, use me! I'm tired of just sitting here! Use me, f**khead, use me!'"

The only thing talent wants is to be used. Check out the auditions on Pilipinas Got Talent, Pinoy Records, and all the various talent contests on TV. People from all walks of life, trying their luck. No, let's be honest: showing off. And some of them impress you so much it makes you want to stand up and cheer, for talent cannot be denied.

Ask the real artists, the masters of their craft. The ones who can reach glass-shattering notes when they sing, the ones whose paintings go for million-dollar auctions, the ones who twirl and dance like they have no bones. Ask the authors whose books are on the New York Times Bestseller List. They'll say that at the bottom of their hearts, they don't do it for money. They do it because they can; they do it for love. (Of course you get a kick out of being paid, but it's just icing on the cake.)

All of us have talent, be it deep-sea diving, putting babies to sleep, cooking a mean pasta puttanesca, or, as Ted Brautigan says it, dividing ten-digit numbers in your head. It gives us a nice kind of high when it is used, and used well. What is it that I want to do, the one thing I know I can do well, the one thing that makes me happy and at peace with myself? I want to write. So I think I will keep writing—in diaries, blogs, scraps of paper—as long as I can.

And what happens if I can't write anymore? Then something in me will die.

Let's take the lyrics from The Guitar Man by Bread:

Then the lights begin to flicker and the sound is getting dim
The voice begins to falter and the crowds are getting thin
But he never seems to notice, he's just got to find another place to play
Fade away, got to play.

That's what talent is.