Someone asked me recently about what it means to write or
to be a writer. I am afraid I gave a very pompous and technical answer that did
not answer the real question she was trying to grapple with. I should have
said: you are already writing and you are already a writer. Perhaps not with
ink at the end but you are in a story and you are mostly making it up as you go
along much like any book on any shelf of stories.
I should have said that the fascination for creativity
can take away from many innate creative impulses and being focused too much on
the way a book looks and feels and smells and sits on the shelf may rob you of
the experience of reading the darn thing. The un-examined life, they say and
perhaps rightly, is not worth living but neither is the over analyzed shadow of
a life lived on hopes for the outside taste of things without the necessary joy
in the inside flow of things. In short, it is far better to live than to wish
you were living. Or put another way, it is a better preoccupation to apply
yourself to the terrors and beauties of your own story than to wish you had a
story. Of course you do. It is happening to you right now in many varied ways.
We live on a vain patch of the universe that is
constantly elevating things out of proportion. We have eternity in our hearts
so we are constantly in the race to do immortal things. We are looking for
relevance and power and security and purpose and that unique flavor of truth
splattered on a thousand walls in a million cities:
“……waz here” or
something to that effect. We all want to waz be here. So we make up writers, singers, actors,
scientists, politicians and activists as demi-gods to validate the human
experience. We elevate some so we can deflate others and seek that elevation to
keep us away from the latter group. So we can matter and be waz here. This
might all seem sensible and pleasant as a humanist view of that greater life of
meaning but as a general rule of living it is silly. A general rule for all
life must apply to all life. A society of classes of purpose cannot have a
general rule outside survival of the fittest. Winners and losers are the very
rule of the game. Man has yet to devise a system of life that creates value for
one without robbing some value, or sense of value, from others. It will always
be a zero sum game. Except to the winner and his caste. They will all rely on
evolution. They will all say the poor are all lazy and the cheated are all dumb
and the powerless are all naïve. The one that has his value taken is deserving
of the loss. He was no writer or singer or actor or genius or hard worker or
leader. He was weak. He waz not here.
This is not true. It may make us all sleep at night and
not encounter the guilt of success but we have to give logic a holiday to truly
believe that life is fair and people the world over get what they deserve.
I am a Christian because in Christ I find the ultimate counter-argument
to the fallacy that material success is all good and by the way success is…
If God came to earth in the form of a tribesman to a
group under the boot of an empire, uninspired, flailing, much invaded and much
hated, what does that tell us about our worship of overt success? If he chose a
carpenter and a maiden to raise him in relative poverty what does that portend
for my ideas of generational wealth? If he did little until his thirtieth
birthday and did everything for all time in three short years after what does
that say of our worship of youth and our struggle for old age? If he died like
a criminal, never had any money, did not command the respect of everyone who
met him or left undisputed what does that say of our love of legacy and of
comfort, of validation and vindication?
A correct appraisal of Christ leaves me with the scary
notion that all the things I have been told about the general rule of living
add up to a house built on sand. It cannot withstand the coming storm of
eternity that makes everything new.
There is a life that is life. There is a book that is
being written. We are all writers. It is not for the vain or the accomplished
or the haughty. These things pass. It is for those we ache for something else.
The life advertised in the most beautiful and horrific moments in life, it
tells us of the beauty of orange tinted sunrises and the tragedy of murder: it
says there is more and there must be more at the same time.
