Do your hands ever all of a sudden lose the ability to write?  The letters, formerly tight scribbling cursive, loosen to flowing nonsense.  The letters are trying to flatline; the life is going out of the letters.  Why?  Where does the life of a letter go?  Where did it come from?  

The fingers, you see.  The fingers are flaccid.  The fingers have lost the ability to let the words out.  Perhaps also the fingers have lost the ability to pull the words in, from whence to be let out.  The fingers find themselves inutile, lacking utility.

It is perhaps to be thought of like the workings of a fire hose.  The fingers lose their force.  It is discovered the mind has got a jam and it is resulting in no vast outpouring of ideas down from mind, traversing neck, shoulder, and arm, to finally the dominant hand.  The dominant hand behind the jam finds itself a humiliated conduit.

That there has occurred a jam does not mean that the mind is dead.  Perhaps there is a kink in the wire; the circuit gets short, the brain hot, yet the fire that may come is of no use to the surprised fingers.  The mind may go faster--though not always to more purpose, and sometimes so quickly it goes that no purpose can hold on--but the rapidity confines itself to the tight circles of the short circuit.

The notion of a block, a blockage, blockading what you want from ever arriving in the mind, steals the food from the roots of the blooms that come from the fingers.

The writer’s block: Perhaps it is like the old Communist block.  The fear is background noise that even the diligent will be taken over, will fall in line, that the mind will fall like a weak little domino, that from fallen dominoes come no ideas worth pouring from mind to paper.  If Poland falls, it is time for hysteria.  If Cuba falls, the way is shut.  If Japan falls, there is no hope.

It is an interesting thought, this domino-effecting writer’s block, but today’s problem is with neither mind nor paper, but rather the fingers.  Forget not the fingers.

The flaccid fingers insist, Adam-like, not unjustifiably, that it is the unflexed muscles of the forearm that create finger inutility.  The forearm, carrying the fallen intent of the fingers and casting about for a snake to castigate suggests the mind oughtn’t put it in such a place, between busy mind and slavish dominant hand.  The position is untenable.  It is amazing the arm suffered the hand as long as it did.  The arm is to be commended for long service.  The mind is to be abashed at expecting so much, so often, without a thought for the arm.  Carpal tunnel syndrome! spits the arm, worried and indignant.

The mind, buzzing and pent up, shakes its head at fingers and arm.  The mind decides it will grant truth to digits and arm alike and lets them entirely alone for the duration.  The mind talks to itself, discontent self contained grumbles and interesting ideas that wanted writing bumping into each other in a clumsy dance of denied expression.

The hands--resentful of their omission in the discourse of fingers, arm, and mind alike--seize up, becoming claws in which no pen may remain.  There will be no words today.  The hand is done.