Prelude:
a moment of silence honoring the unreal…

By rule of opposites, where physicians are sick, psychiatrists mad, soldiers cowards, police criminals, writers are … dumb.

The rest I leave to silence, the watchman announces at the opening of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon - and the watchman, whose attention goes beyond himself into distances, is the writer as well as the reader. We are all sentinels, looking out for, looking in for … what is not there.

A creative writer is a marauder of emptiness. The booty of myth, of story and meaning, comes at a steep price: to occupy the empty page, a writer abandons reality, de-realizes the present, and invades the purely potential - the world of nothing. What the writer brings back is an alternative to the present, pure fantasy, the fundamental stuff of our being and our nothingness.

Creative writing embodies in words this deeper silence: the imaginary, the not-there. Kafka (in Reflections on Sin, Pain, Hope, and The True Way) says about the art of fiction, “What is laid upon us is to accomplish the negative; the positive is already given.”

We share a covenant with silence – and as readers and writers, we agree to accomplish the negative. The memoranda that follow inquire into this agreement with the not-real and reflect on how imaginative writing marks our human boundary and bond with silence.