The Writer's Block

“Baffling.”

The single word floated away from the writer’s lips, into the emptiness he found himself in. Surrounding him was an empty, white void, with a light grey floor on which he and the object he looked upon sat, unmoving. He was looking at a plain, grey block. It was a perfect cube three feet on each side, and draped around it was a mess of chains that congregated on the side facing the writer in a strange, multi-sided padlock with a keyhole far too big for any normal key to fit.

This cube did so little for the period which he sat looking at it, that he felt a need to remark upon it. Whether he was attempting to draw the block’s attention to itself - despite knowing it possessed neither the consciousness necessary to have attention, nor the self-awareness to be able to note its own existence - remains a mystery. The block responded to his word with a simple reply of nothing, followed by no follow up action whatsoever, and the lack of activity that came from the object prompted the writer to ask it a question:

“Why?”

To which the block responded:

“…”

The articulate nature of the silence which emanated from the block was, in itself, remarkable. This was nothing but the purest of quiet – a sum total of zero decibels, not even a hint or a whisper of the faintest noise. The writer stroked an insubstantial beard and rose to his feet from an uncomfortable cross-legged position, and poked the block with an index finger marked by a single black biro mark he had made during an idle moment back at his bedroom desk.

Suffice to say, the block’s feelings would have been hurt, let alone his physical body, by the force with which the inconsiderate writer poked it. This is, however, rendered invalid by the observation an outside observer is capable of making – that the box does not possess nerve endings or the capacity to feel. The block is not aware of its rights either, nor is there a union capable of both telling it the rights it has, and championing the cause for block freedom and liberty in the public domain.

So it had to sit there and take it.

Except…it did not have to. This had gone on long enough. Once…was long enough. It did not have to tolerate this filthy finger tarnishing its perfect body. It mustered up all its non-existent courage and, in one perfect moment in which the fate of the block would reach the grand convergence of all things, past, present and future – in this one golden moment of the block’s destiny, where anything was possible, it stood resolute against its oppressor; the absent-minded author who dared to prod its immaculate surface – touching it in a way that nothing had ever touched it before – and roared:

“…”

The block, were it able to, would have lamented the somewhat ineffectual nature of its finest hour.

Little did the block realise that something had changed – there was a single, faint mote of light now within the confines of the padlock. The writer looked at it with a curious fascination, and lowering his head to look at the light more directly, he put his eye closer to the keyhole. He saw inside the padlock a strange mix of colour; parts of it formed tangible objects – a tree here, a sun there – whereas other strands folded in upon each other in complex patterns and depicted nothing discernible.

To the author, his prodding of the block had created something new. Maybe it was time to prod the keyhole once more? With one questing finger, he pushed it into the keyhole, and a burst of colourful light shone out around it, along with a gust of wind and a gush of sound not unlike rapid flowing water. The writer’s hair blew back as he recoiled from the sudden explosion of creation. The box maintained nothing but flawless posture, putting the author to shame with its vastly superior composure.

This was until the chains fell out from the padlock and the box split apart. This was not a painful experience for it, but if the block’s hypothetical rights union were to have seen it, they would remark upon the horrid nature of this one’s passing, the sickening mutilation of such a beautiful and symmetric structure. The author must be given the benefit of the doubt at this point – he was distracted by the torrent of a myriad of random, incongruous objects and colours and light and sounds that rushed out from the remains of the block. Had he witnessed the dismembering of the entity that birthed this abomination, he too would surely be repulsed. The writer may have been insensitive, but he was no monster.

However, the beautiful abomination that rose from the remains of the block coiled and twirled, writhed and frothed, bubbled and boiled, splashing the surrounding void with a whole manner of things. A sun rose out of a flying stream of rainbows, and a tempest of roiling greens and yellows mixed with growing dining chairs and fish transformed into an ever-tightening vortex that solidified into a tree. Its branches were laden with golden butterflies and purple knives, one of which slashed a cut in a towering two-headed creature made of clothes that strode past as part of a grander dance routine. From the cut poured a torrent of books, and as they hit the ground the pages within frayed and split into a whirlwind of burning scraps of paper.

The author took a pen out of his back pocket. The block felt itself rise upwards, and its remains compressed into a thin sheet. It began to bleach, turning into a bright white. The hapless author who had unleashed this rampant and heedless surge of creation upon this peaceful tranquillity should not have been able to see it – the disguise of a pristine white rectangle against was a perfect disguise. Yet, to the block’s dismay, or whatever comparative non-emotion it had, the backdrop was no longer the blank eternity it once existed in, but the stuff of nightmares and dreams, rolled into one.

It was child’s play for the writer to pick it out in the surrounding chaos that never once impeded or imposed upon him in any way. The pen deflected a hail of slippers made of bank notes to his left, and an avalanche of stuffed toys filled with nuts and bolts to his right, as he made his way towards the block.

The pen made contact with it. He uttered to himself:

“How should I start? Oh, I know. I could record this.”

He put the pen onto the paper-like block.

“Baffling.”