You're Yinsane!
When we pick up a pen, we hold
danger in our fist. The dreamthreads we weave into Story and cast upon the
waters net ... what? Sometimes a big fish! I think, of course, of Moby Dick
and our modern encounter with the irrational. More heatedly in this age
of global warming, I recall Hobbes' Leviathan. From the front end of the
17th century at the dawn of the Enlightenment, that tome reveals a mechanistic
universe of matter and motion and forecasts the Industrial Revolution and
the sovereignty of the manufactured world in which we live.
Great thoughts are prisons
between the worlds. And though we as a society are, in fact, swallowed by
Leviathan and, like Noah, a prisoner between worlds, each of us as individuals
retains the power to weave our own narratives -- to seize danger in our
own fists. This is an awesome ability only lately discovered in human history.
We are new at it. And there isn't much time. The weight of living tugs us
down to earth, which wants us back. In the interval before we become earth,
we live in a country of drifting, and how our life comes together is not
a casual matter.
Creative writing aspires to
carry us out of our body, toward illumination, into a magic world of images
and insights, but actually writing and reading drop us into the darkest
amplitude of this vast creation. The linearity of text is not a fishing
line really but a lifeline. The personal, intimate fictions we experience
and sometimes write down are our dreams set against the nightmare tantrum
of history, our secret art versus the world's.
Of course, if you're a creative
writer, you know all this. You're yinsane! So think of this entry sort of
like a Miranda rule, a warning to both of us before we begin the daemonic
process that arrests our attention in the blank page and subjects us to
the grueling interrogation and solitude that is creative writing.
Though the page is empty, dark
beauty fills it. And though our ideas, our expectations, assumptions and
prejudices have imprisoned us between worlds, our intent is good. |