March 6, 2010

• The life of words

  Haven't written a post at the crest of its inspirational wave for awhile now.  Perhaps we're due?

  It seems sometimes that people can be in love with their emotions, even if they are negative emotions.  Of course this is not something that someone who was deeply melancholy all the time would think.  But well enough I still think it is something that can be true.

  Why would someone be in love with sadness?  Perhaps it's because there's a kind of gravity and importance around tragedy—Macbeth and others are people whose stories are worth telling.  So while a person may be sad, the thought is that at least they are important enough to be sad. 

  For as Lord Henry says, it is ennui which is to be avoided at all costs.  I suppose from there it wouldn't matter whether it was happiness or misery that was one's vehicle of escape.

  Why do we have to write anything down at all? 

  I can imagine a conversation had with a person on a deck overlooking a large field that meets a treeline, beyond which an orange glow receded into the midsummer day's phosphorous evening.  We were sort of friends, and while the view was one to be hidden forever in one's heart, we didn't know how the evening would go.  "This is how I imagine every day I eat a bowl of lucky charms ending.  The magic carries through the whole day," one would say.  "That probably depends on how well you eat the lucky charms."  "Save the marshmallows for last?"  "Exactly."  

  The intricacies and strategies of eating different cereals would go on to be discussed in detail.  And then the two would depart, never having to tell anyone of the experience again.  It would be a full interaction, for it started with a comment that caused a mutual understanding of the magnificence of the view, while then delving into the particular details that the mind appreciates along life's way, a perfect suspension of conversation between the silly and the sublime.  It is furthermore often the case that a person feels their existence is most fully appreciated when the specific things their mind appreciates along life's way—things they normally would never have spoken of—are noticed and discussed with another person.

  Perhaps we will get sad at times, but it seems we should strive for another kind of interaction with people and view of life, one that sees sadness only as a necessity in responding to sad states of affairs.   But oftentimes people do get sad, and seem to be that way all the time, even though we exist in a world with such fun to be had.  Such a habitually sad person would have been off and distant on the deck of that summery evening.  There would be a distance between them and the other person, perhaps for no real pinpointable reason whatsoever.  No words would be spoken, and thus conversation would not be the pleasure for which one was happy to be alive.

  And that is why one must write; for ideally, either person on the deck would not have to think about their experience as though they were someone else.  They would not have to notice why it was that the evening was so delightful, how it filled them with life, how it let them feel like their memories were secret treasures no one else could know about, all in attempt to recreate the experience in the mind of someone else through writing.  Instead they would just feel happy themselves and move on in life.  One need only enter a third person point of view about life in order to know how to represent it to someone else.  And if there are valuable ways of looking at life, if it something which we know we should not always be sad about, then it seems it is worthwhile to write as a way of showing that to be true.  Art is the rhetoric for the way you see life.

  Besides, we are all so sleepy.  We need writers to wake us up, to remind us we're alive.  It's a startlingly easy thing to forget.  So I wasn't planning this, but (raises glass), this one's to you Jack!  Thanks for reminding us we only live once, and that we must not fall asleep.

  • 11:20 pm
  • 3 Comments