Saturday, January 12, 2008

Bathroom Monologue: The man behind the curtain paused a moment, and cleared his throat

You see, language chases after reality. Action does not describe words. Words are assigned to action, and they follow after it. Some of us, the thinkers, philosophers and assholes, try to make sense out of action through words. Some of us, the journalists, storytellers and liars, try to convey what happened through words. Some of us, the truly insane, try to tell what happened and assign meaning to what happened through words. We speak and we write to share a part of the human experience that theatre and film cannot, those aspects of thought and observation that are not shared in a visual recreation. It can be funny, it can be heartbreaking, it can be horrifying, but it ought always to be genuine. It is an act of creation that has nothing to do with gender, and an act of mind that has nothing to do with I.Q. Disagree? Oh, there are a lot of dumb writers who lived more interesting lives than smart types. If they're too intimidated to share or improve, whose fault is it? It's skiing down parallel structure, friends, observing what makes things go perpendicular. It is math, as it is music, as it is theatre - it's what happened that night at the theatre, the memorial service thereafter, and the strife the nation went through. It's what the country became without Lincoln. It's what the country became without McKinley. It's what the country became without Kennedy. Without two Kennedys. In fact, it's what we all became, becoming, coming from somewhere, going to somewhere. It's walking, though walking isn't the movement of a body along a plane by way of its legs. Walking is a verb, and that describes just a tiny part of the world. It's words chasing worlds. And if you remember that, you'll have the humility a writer needs. Probably not the publishing deal, though.

1 comment:

Counter est. March 2, 2008