A Return to Writing, A Renewed Love for the Written Word

My blog, now silent for weeks, has lost its sense of direction, navigationally jarred and agitated to the point of possibly heading uphill in ardent struggle to arrive at the Earth's core. Its discombobulated state, however, has proven far from self-defeating, respecting that redefinition is periodically essential, that motion is not always progress, and that only one of all directions is forward. I consider my recent stagnation a privilege, and the fruit of which may conceivably prove progressive –to be consequence-determined by the quality of future writings. Blunt honesty, whether the reader is desirous of it or not, I shall now share: that my inclination to blog had been submarined by what I regard an overabundance, a gut wrenching plethora of literary garbage that pervades every square inch of popular media, specifically the internet, and has trickled down unconditionally unto individuals, bypassing their cognitive facilities, mindlessly accepted and repeated through their own mouths.

It is significant, I believe, to point out that this blog is free. Free in the two-pronged sense that you have paid nothing to read it as I haven't received a single dime to write it, we are both richer for it having been written as well as for it having been read. Free writing is pure, not contaminated with cash-related influences that are capable only of degrading its quality and diminishing its capacity for truth. The content of these words, though hitting on nothing in particular, are just the same untainted, and therefore full.

So few words that echo through this cavernous contemporary culture are pure. Pure in the sense that they originate exclusively from a selfless desire to communicate, from one person to another, an idea: an idea coming from that former person and nothing else, upon receipt of which that latter person has, as gift or poison, from the source something genuine, something without any contaminants whatsoever, something deserving of each of the words that served as its conduit. Words carry with them a rich history, whether the user is aware or ignorant; they may express love, but if not they are worthless, abused. The abuse of words is the perversion of self and society. The preference of silence over speech is sad, but for some may nonetheless be proper and prudent, and this, I believe, may be the saddest truth of all.

It seems these days that if the expression of language to its audience is not packaged through some readily-identifiable Hollywood medium, with some corporate slogan or public figure's logo stamped onto its side, or brandishing some other symbol depictive of a universally recognized "cool", it will come off esoteric to the extent of sounding foreign. It only rumbles through the ears of the inattentive without reaching the innards of their brains, much the same way untranslated Kafka is perceived by the ears of a hearing impaired infant. Novel ideas don't stand a chance when placed side-by-side with the base pragmatic pollution that free-enterprise and unchecked economic prosperity has boiled our language down to. It is an irony that for myself is painful and hope-massacring and for most others is beyond grasp and appreciation that widespread murder evokes not even the attention much less intervention of the same people who will stand in line for hours and spend what meager earnings this covertly totalitarian society has left them with to watch movies like MI3, containing much the same senseless bloodshed that can be seen for free the world over but, for reasons known only to the perpetrators of indifference, is ignored.

My observations reveal to me a society whose behavior is governed entirely by outside influences and cannot for its own benefit or dignity affect its own trajectory or azimuth from within -a free-floating, engineless vessel acting not unlike a hockey puck smacked around the ice by players owning no respect for said puck nor any sympathy for it when it cries out after ricocheting off the dashers. Our opportunity for redemption may have never made itself as real as in the wake of the September 11th attacks, but our society, so ill-prepared for calculated action or well-reasoned diplomatic initiative, embarked on a self-righteous "good fight" against a nameless and faceless foe and in historical retrospect, dispatched a chain of events that adhere to the hockey puck paradigm perfectly. The number of victims killed by American neo-imperialism far exceeds that number lost on September 11th, but this often spoken truth is seldom by the right ears heard.

To my knowledge or to my face, my writing has never been scrutinized or attacked by a free-thinking mind. This is as flattering as it is tragic, and although my writing has indeed suffered insult and injury, it never has by individuals that examine things through the lens of their own self-discovered, independent beliefs and values. I will remind all that "First Response …long overdue" speaks of sharp assaults whose passions and perspectives, though loudly expressed, were not products of respectable minds working for their own sake, rather they were end-result excrements of political manipulation and subversion that left the two voices who expressed them sounding less like credible critics than like conditioned, cultivated mouthpieces of an intricately corrupt political juggernaut that the writers themselves had not even a vague comprehension of. Every one of their arguments can be effortlessly traced back to a catchy political slogan, a commonly embraced but intellectually transparent fallacy, or a hackneyed drone-appealing TV commercial. The amusing event nonetheless left me with the understanding that all good writings will at best come under fire, at worst be flatly ignored, and that all good writers are rewarded with enemies and vendettas appropriately proportioned to their success.

There is another problem that all good writers face, if even only those good writers who have maintained the worth of their words by keeping their identities safely distanced from political and monetary pull: that absolute truth and lucrative truth may perhaps have some plasticity in the degrees to which they overlap, but are certainly not and have never been identical. The problem, that I wonder if this is a loss for all who read any written word or a gain for those few words on the absolute side (for they will always possess this element of exquisite beauty and rule the domain thereof exclusively), will never be resolved or even universally acknowledged not because it is unfounded or too abstract, but because the masses that read one or the other have consciously or unconsciously relinquished the ability to distinguish one from the other, if even they read them at all.

I thank the readers I don't have, that is, those readers whose minds have no application for free-lance, independent thought, for ignoring what I say. Your thought processes, busily suffering their predetermined fate of immersion into the feeding frenzy of pop-culture and receive-mode style entertainment (i.e., action films, reality TV, commercial and movie-star icons) that characterizes our generation, stands to gain nothing from laying eyes on plain and naturally-occurring beauty: absolute truth, free of cosmetic alteration.

All pessimism aside, the sense of obligation that I feel to continue my writing, unaffected by whether or not anyone reads it, stems in no small part from my belief in God: my adherence to his call to spread truth and love, express these through all mediums that I am able, especially those which I am talented, and cannot be discouraged by the apathy and occasional childish put-downs of the thoughtless masses. I take pleasure from seeing my words stand together, unified, working to convey to the world the truths not often enough expressed and the love and fellowship not often enough shared, similar to that pleasure of the machinist who so expertly finished a steel fabricant that he can see his own image staring back at him from the completed piece.

I work hard to craft sentences that can endure the test of time, like children that I hope will survive me. My fingers moving over these keys like a hammer striking an anvil are making this ear-splitting sound, sending sparks outward and wisps of smoke upward, leaving the ironwork, my sentences, tough and durable. The only way I know how to write, with a hot fire and a heavy hammer, may someday be overtaken by the efficiency and expediency of industry, but these new methods cannot leave the customer with the same satisfaction and warmth of something borne of sweat, skillmanship, and sincerity, delivered with the care and concern of its crafter from his heart -a measure of quality I hope the refined readers will always appreciate and demand for their dollar.

It has never been my aim to leave the reader confused or with means to reach any end of understanding other than what they can confidently call their own. I will accept gratitude for assistance in discovery, but never for constructing another's belief. If upon reading these words, one feels anger/hatred/discomfort toward their source, the writer, myself, then they should be critical of that specific emotion as though it were, itself, written word. The displeasure you feel is likely a child of the mother: self-awareness you are seldom face to face with, and the father: subconscious resistance to accept blame as your own –an unnatural behavior you are stuck with for which you may thank Western Culture. Whomever the parents, you cannot blame the writing, for if you felt no such knee-jerk discontent, the words would read innocuous.