Stop Scribbling You Goddamn Monkeys
Writers living in 21st century America, specifically right now:
Writers write because we dare to stand in the fire. Because we know from stories of cremation and martyrdom that the human body burns with a horrifying ease. And being nothing so vulnerable to combustion as greasy lipids within a pitifully thin casing, we make words because our desire to scream outstrips the toxic fumes cauterizing our lungs. We endure ashes, skin peeling like wallpaper, because we know we are saved even by our shouting. We know skin grows back stronger.
In this nation and our time in it, it is difficult to muster the energy and the oxygen to scream. The fire can seem omnipresent, chokingly omnipotent. It knows what we look like; it mocks what we think; it knows our fears and our only escape routes. For folks with minds, hearts, and artistic inclinations the conflagration of 21st century America and the ruin we've grown into can seem like a community theater drama retelling the history of Rome. And unlike us, they actually had true democracy before the great fall, so the worst anyone could say back then is that they had truly had it better. Whether our American fiction grew tired of us and left or whether we subconsciously abandoned it does not matter, not anymore. The fiction of America that was promised us, the fiction we worked for, and whatever agreement there could have been between those two - they are not even gauze now. They are not even the skin of an onion. And they may still have their moments of sweetness, but so does antifreeze.
The question should not be how to return our unclever fiction to its place of prominence. It will continue spiralling ever outward into an unending past. Liberty, Communism, Liberalism, Jesus Christ, Martin Luther King Jr., John Lennon... we capitalize what and who we cannot explain, then destroy it; worship followed by abandonment. The question must be, what replaces this? What supplants this mode of thinking? This isn't a morbid challenge, nor clarion call to propagandize for whichever corporate sellout's forked-tongue side you happen to take. Like I said - no matter which form our wrinkled fictions take, they are no longer instructive. We learn less from watching a Presidential debate than we do from opening the window in the morning. We learn less from the 24-hour news cycle than one page of a good book, and not a soul among us can say for sure which contains more statements of fact.
I want you to know - you individually, whoever you are: it's become very difficult for me to bring myself to write and create in this current time and place, and I'm sure it has for many of you. It's not just a 5-day work week, and it's not just a busy schedule with its time management snafus. It has never been this tough or this fruitless to be thoughtful and creative in an industrialized society. America has never in its entire history been this easily distracted, this conveniently inert, or this proudly anti-intellectual. It has also never been more crucial that you and I do whatever we can right now as loudly as we can to make that stop.
Writers! Our paradigm has fallen away, our blankets pulled off of our sluggish frames as we sleep. We can not sustain our roles as mere distractions, entertainments, pacifiers. We are oracles, and we must assume that and begin to look. Historically we were shamans and wizards, soothsayers. We were more powerful than the gods, so much moreso in fact that we created them and gave them names. We didn't make the dust or the bodies we said arose from it - but we named it "dust!" And we gave ourselves "bodies." If no other lesson is clear from modern politics, it is that he who controls the language runs the game. Simply, we set aside our true power decades or centuries ago. We allowed it to become one among so many other words we'd created: economy. Capital. Fame. Profit. Religion. We pretend that the power of our writing depends on these illusions. There is less money than ever in what humanity needs to hear these days - but there is everything more to be gained.
When we write, ours must not be shits and giggles but wailings, gnashings of teeth, laughter so hard-hitting it hurts. No more bedside fairytales for lazy male fuck-ups! To the gallows with chick-lit! Death to shitty 80's cartoon remakes! It is time to write truth. We must be truth, spoken to power even in the shell of a hypothetical narrative. Nearly all our stories now are mere clothing with no bodies within - in other words, not stories at all. It is time to stop referring to empty shells as turtles! Whether we weave the clothes of a comedy or a drama, a male or female protagonist or antagonist, our method and duty is to hang that outfit on truth or at least look for where it's hiding. Without a belief in some answer to life other than death, there is no reason for us to continue writing. Or living, for that matter.
And just what are we surrounded with but that - the argument coming seemingly from all directions that life is just death and nothing else? Easy commodities, surveillance societies, fanatical terrorists, burning economies, corn syrup, trans-fat, Hallmark love, salvation by megachurch: "There is no answer to life but death, so start killing yourself now! Let us help! Let us sell you slavery! Let us sell you a lifestyle, an idea, a disease! If you don't let us keep you safe by killing you, other zealots are waiting at your doorstep!" When you really add up all the things you spend money on and years spent toiling for shit that kills you, you start to realize that your funeral may be a hell of a lot more expensive than your initial budget. And the world is full of hot ovens and piles of wood ready to incinerate us all when we do bow out, whether we fancy ourselves dead already or commit heresy and get burned at the stake by angry villagers.
Will you scream as you burn, or will you choose to choke? It's that simple, kids, really. Stop scribbling, you goddamn monkeys! And start writing.
Writers write because we dare to stand in the fire. Because we know from stories of cremation and martyrdom that the human body burns with a horrifying ease. And being nothing so vulnerable to combustion as greasy lipids within a pitifully thin casing, we make words because our desire to scream outstrips the toxic fumes cauterizing our lungs. We endure ashes, skin peeling like wallpaper, because we know we are saved even by our shouting. We know skin grows back stronger.
In this nation and our time in it, it is difficult to muster the energy and the oxygen to scream. The fire can seem omnipresent, chokingly omnipotent. It knows what we look like; it mocks what we think; it knows our fears and our only escape routes. For folks with minds, hearts, and artistic inclinations the conflagration of 21st century America and the ruin we've grown into can seem like a community theater drama retelling the history of Rome. And unlike us, they actually had true democracy before the great fall, so the worst anyone could say back then is that they had truly had it better. Whether our American fiction grew tired of us and left or whether we subconsciously abandoned it does not matter, not anymore. The fiction of America that was promised us, the fiction we worked for, and whatever agreement there could have been between those two - they are not even gauze now. They are not even the skin of an onion. And they may still have their moments of sweetness, but so does antifreeze.
The question should not be how to return our unclever fiction to its place of prominence. It will continue spiralling ever outward into an unending past. Liberty, Communism, Liberalism, Jesus Christ, Martin Luther King Jr., John Lennon... we capitalize what and who we cannot explain, then destroy it; worship followed by abandonment. The question must be, what replaces this? What supplants this mode of thinking? This isn't a morbid challenge, nor clarion call to propagandize for whichever corporate sellout's forked-tongue side you happen to take. Like I said - no matter which form our wrinkled fictions take, they are no longer instructive. We learn less from watching a Presidential debate than we do from opening the window in the morning. We learn less from the 24-hour news cycle than one page of a good book, and not a soul among us can say for sure which contains more statements of fact.
I want you to know - you individually, whoever you are: it's become very difficult for me to bring myself to write and create in this current time and place, and I'm sure it has for many of you. It's not just a 5-day work week, and it's not just a busy schedule with its time management snafus. It has never been this tough or this fruitless to be thoughtful and creative in an industrialized society. America has never in its entire history been this easily distracted, this conveniently inert, or this proudly anti-intellectual. It has also never been more crucial that you and I do whatever we can right now as loudly as we can to make that stop.
Writers! Our paradigm has fallen away, our blankets pulled off of our sluggish frames as we sleep. We can not sustain our roles as mere distractions, entertainments, pacifiers. We are oracles, and we must assume that and begin to look. Historically we were shamans and wizards, soothsayers. We were more powerful than the gods, so much moreso in fact that we created them and gave them names. We didn't make the dust or the bodies we said arose from it - but we named it "dust!" And we gave ourselves "bodies." If no other lesson is clear from modern politics, it is that he who controls the language runs the game. Simply, we set aside our true power decades or centuries ago. We allowed it to become one among so many other words we'd created: economy. Capital. Fame. Profit. Religion. We pretend that the power of our writing depends on these illusions. There is less money than ever in what humanity needs to hear these days - but there is everything more to be gained.
When we write, ours must not be shits and giggles but wailings, gnashings of teeth, laughter so hard-hitting it hurts. No more bedside fairytales for lazy male fuck-ups! To the gallows with chick-lit! Death to shitty 80's cartoon remakes! It is time to write truth. We must be truth, spoken to power even in the shell of a hypothetical narrative. Nearly all our stories now are mere clothing with no bodies within - in other words, not stories at all. It is time to stop referring to empty shells as turtles! Whether we weave the clothes of a comedy or a drama, a male or female protagonist or antagonist, our method and duty is to hang that outfit on truth or at least look for where it's hiding. Without a belief in some answer to life other than death, there is no reason for us to continue writing. Or living, for that matter.
And just what are we surrounded with but that - the argument coming seemingly from all directions that life is just death and nothing else? Easy commodities, surveillance societies, fanatical terrorists, burning economies, corn syrup, trans-fat, Hallmark love, salvation by megachurch: "There is no answer to life but death, so start killing yourself now! Let us help! Let us sell you slavery! Let us sell you a lifestyle, an idea, a disease! If you don't let us keep you safe by killing you, other zealots are waiting at your doorstep!" When you really add up all the things you spend money on and years spent toiling for shit that kills you, you start to realize that your funeral may be a hell of a lot more expensive than your initial budget. And the world is full of hot ovens and piles of wood ready to incinerate us all when we do bow out, whether we fancy ourselves dead already or commit heresy and get burned at the stake by angry villagers.
Will you scream as you burn, or will you choose to choke? It's that simple, kids, really. Stop scribbling, you goddamn monkeys! And start writing.