#21
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.