Tuesday, April 3, 2012

The Written World

And so it goes… And inevitably, well, perhaps not inevitably, but eventually, he begins. He puts pen to paper… well, perhaps not pen to paper, but fingers to keyboard and the words begin to flow. They do not flow naturally or smoothly, they do not coalesce into concrete thoughts or ideas; they simply spill out onto the page and dribble down into pools of inconsequence. They are words for words sake, but that’s fine. At least they are words.

Words: the one true god, the savior for so long, and now even they seem to abandon more often than they free. He has been without words for too long and they are faded in his mind like drunken memories: real, yet insubstantial and suspicious. But now, if they are not returned, at least, again, they are utilized. They are drug forth fully grown like children from the cranium of Zeus and hurled onto the page with abandon as if they might, once there, form some picture on their own.

And is that not how the tapestry is woven? Is that not how the words create? By accident, or if not by accident, by chance, or if not by chance, than by happenstance: a peculiarity of mind and language swirling into a colloid which hardens into a shape.

And that shape can be anything. It can be a lump of rock, or a ball of yarn, it can be a grain of sand or a world all its own. And is it in the power of the writer to say which it will be? Perhaps. But perhaps not, for writers aplenty have written their grains of sands and called them worlds only to be crushed when others did not see them so. And others have borne into being entire universes and thought themselves charlatans. We have no control over this thing we do. We simply do it. And at the end of the day, or the end of the life, we look back on it, and like miniature gods say only if it is Good.

How many iterations of our world did our writer/God go through before pronouncing those words. How many times were worlds brought forth from ash and splayed out on page and pronounced to be complete and utter shit and hurled into the ethereal trash can before our world, our flawed and tainted and beautiful world, was Good.

And we live on even now on the faith of that author. That author who, if as fickle as I, may one day abandon the story, or realize it has all been for naught or derailed into something unintended, and upon that realization take this world, our world, which he created from nothing, and ball it up (figuratively, of course), and throw it into the trash.

Perhaps this will happen soon. Perhaps it already has happened. Perhaps the madness in our world is not the madness of our writer, but his absence. Perhaps we are a derelict world circling a derelict sun in a derelict galaxy on the edge of a derelict universe that was trashed, and we spin now in uncertainty, and, left to our own devices, falter.

God is not dead, then, in that scenario. God is not even God, only god. God is simply the writer. And god has grown bored with our story. Maybe he has moved on to one better. Maybe he has given up writing altogether and now works as a language arts teacher in some metaphysical middle school. Maybe god gave up.

And if I, the writer, am a god all my own, and my whims are the life and the death of some existence, dare I ever write another word? Dare I stop?