Creative Writing
Requires no license. No authorization.
Only the author.
This wasn't always so. Writing
began as an occult art, which served either the celestial gods or the terrestrial
god, the king.
The oldest written story, The
Epic of Gilgamesh, fulfilled the talismanic purposes of an author who was
the first to set his name to a work of creative writing: Sin-liqe-unninni,
a professional exorcist and resident of Uruk over three thousand years ago.
The incipit of this most ancient text vividly asserts the sorcery of its
author's purpose: He who stared into the abyss.
Scored with human blood, writing
not only defines and authenticates our lives, it also provides an expressive
liberty we call imagination. Those of us uncultivated in the profound implications
of contemporary physics minimize its power with phrases such as: just imagination.
Since earliest times, imagination
has told us there's more to reality than meets the eye. Now, through science,
we know that's true. Quantal interconnectedness, entanglement of subatomic
particles, non-local phenomena such as Bell's Inequality, and the illusion
of time (Einstein's relativity revelation, already over a century old) are
all well worth checking out if you're not familiar with them. They imply
that the abyss is not at all what it seems.
The mind's eye is what gazes
out from the pit. The irrational intelligence that author's our dreams,
the spontaneously fanciful part of our human reality that inspires our poetry
and fantasies - our yinsanity - is our freaky yet serene freefall through
our days to the vanishing point.
Because we now know time as
an illusion, we can forget about the tyranny of the past and the one way
arrow to the future. Unlike the Sumerian sorcerers who invented writing,
we have the possibility of understanding something very powerful about the
vanishing point. It's not necessarily the end. We can conceive of it as
the beginning.
Death emanates our lives. The
vanishing point becomes the point of origin, where we appear in the void
as the sum of our lives. Everything we are is there - where we begin!
The illusion - as convincing
as the sun rising or stars wheeling - is that we are falling toward our
last moment. No. We are ascending out of it.
The poetic conclusion to the
truth of contemporary physics is this: we are the abyss. Forget your anthropocentrism.
Our brains evolved to serve our gonads and ovaries, not reality. Our genitals,
powered by Darwinian forces, inveigh against the extravagant truth that
we are evoked out of nothing, out of an astonishing strangeness we call
reality but may just as well and more accurately name for what it really
is: unknowable mystery.
Dazzling, light-filled emanation
of death, you are the sublime agonist. Reason struggles against you. But
your significance surpasses all understanding, all concepts. You survived
the downfall of heaven. Existence for you is but a dream. Erotic, prophetic,
ephemeral, your appearance is an incomprehensible apparition in the void.
In a flash of fright and lust, those who came before you are gone.
Before you also disappear,
you have recourse to a fierce power rare among our kind and more transmogrifying
than music. You can write. The anthropocentric fanatics among us will try
to use that power against you. Contracts, tax forms, levies, rules, regulations,
laws, manuals, bills, theses, pamphlets, fact sheets, histories, authorizations,
wills, edicts, reports, critiques, reviews, catalogues, monographs, policies,
assessments, subpoenas, letters testamentary, missives, licenses, tracts,
position papers, notices, amendments, résumés, essays, transcripts,
brochures, memos, articles, epistles, billboards, permits, disquisitions,
newsletters, memoirs, lists, ordinances, interviews, encyclicals, announcements,
notes, invoices, ad campaigns, rosters, dissertations, charters, hagiologies,
writs, registrations, dossiers, e-mails, compositions, treatises, mission
statements, analyses, proclamations, records, weblogs and, of course, memoranda
- anything the modern mind can spell out to spellbind you, the glandular
zealots will exploit to keep you normative, anything to exorcise your irrational
splendor.
Fight back. Write a poem. Not
any poem. Not doggerel. Write a folkloric poem about your uncanny spirit
rising out of the abyss, emanating from death, raying backward through the
delusion of time from the appearance point. Make it something deeper than
logic or will, something mystically shaped by our grander unity. If modern
physics is right, this poem will not only change you - it will change the
world. You will find yourself living in a different universe. And the more
intimately you touch the secret state of your imaginative nature, the more
profoundly and irresistibly will you transfigure our unparalleled universe.
Unleash your strange power
and write a story. Resist the numbing toxin of spider-minded writing instructors
who urge you to write about what you know. They want to tangle you up in
their webs of reason spun from the swollen glands of our terrible, desolate
evolutionary survival. But you already know we don't survive. You are an
emanation of death. You have leaped directly out of the pit.
So, write flamboyantly about
all that is unknown and unknowable. Write at the limits of sight and light,
in the tenebrous ranges that curve into the abyss. Don't try to make it
good. Make it bad, shocking and exultant, a mesmeric mix of transcendent
and infernal. Admire what's bad in your writing and redefine it deeper to
holy. Bloody the tight-lipped mouth of God and press yourself passionately
against the heart of infinity.
Don't let anybody fool you
again. You are the mysterious, majestic spirit of the incomprehensible. |