Muzzle Discarded

At one point in time he was told, by someone who knew, that a writer who is young ought to write about youth. It’s the only thing anyone of that age has balance on and it’s the only intimacy, according to the person who knew. But the more he thought about what he knew, the less balance he felt on any subject, let alone his childhood. He hungered for ideas until he drowned in them. So many words that said everything. It dawned on him that he once had a dumb youth and he wanted it back. He wanted to push away the words, to relent into the safety of his fears, and to forget that he had ever heard anything in the first place.

Yet he wanted more than anything to testify, and his was a story of testament. His was the same blind story as anyone else’s, and he was as afraid to tell it as much as everyone was to hear it, because just like him they had thought the story was theirs alone. Needing testament and fearing it, eroding in the silence of passing days, this, he assumed, was the idea of the shared human experience. He read enough to know that words dictated the perpetuity of ideals, chiefly by being immune to the plagues and invasions of mortal blood. They did not fare well with fire, but their fiercest protectors were vigilant, and they were not limited to paper. It required a special brand of audacity to make permanent one’s own words, he reasoned, but only because he felt his own words were foolish. They did not merit permanence because he had seen nothing new.

All of those words had already been recorded, mostly, he felt, on the basis of imposition. Millions of people had already lived a million lives right where he lived now, just as desperate and inventive, and now they were barely ghosts because a myth of letters replaced their myth of voices and when they died their voices were extinguished, along with everything they forgot to say. And yet all around him he saw images of people in love with only one story, believing in only one book. They fought over exactly which one book that was, many without doing so much as choosing. Inevitably this made him wish to invoke a book against the nature of books. He would kill the words and they deserved to die.

He had made this adolescent proclamation, and shortly thereafter encountered that every assumption he had made about himself was wrong. He was no savior. He was an ordinary man, so pathetically ordinary that even his most transformative and lucid moments of transcendence were part of stories told before him, by other people, with their illusions in mind, funneled down through his ordinarily derivative ethos.

Now it was not just his own stories that were pointless, it was all stories, inasmuch as they were conceived by a person taking time to distort and plagiarize the unrepeatable, in his or her vernacular, sitting at a desk or chair or standing mightily over a dresser, removing both one’s self from the moment and the moment from the past in hope that both will be there in the future. Although he purported to be wary of the maxims of self-enlightened gurus, he often heard himself saying, “You can never be in the now and think you’re in the now at the same time,” and also, “He who speaks does not know, and he who knows does not speak.”

But he was speaking, spouting out underestimations when he got his turn, aching to profess his silent and eternal wisdom. He was no more or less loathsome than others his age, and he laughed enough to be liked, but the contradictions were multiplying. Inevitability has a way of sticking around, despite what you tell it.

By his own decree his last words were destined to be famous, and famous last words by definition were always aggressive finalities. No one ever responded with the trite saying, “Famous last words,” to someone that had a passive take on circumstances. He remembered hearing somewhere from someone, “There’s a fine line between assertion and idiocy,” but he often wondered exactly who was going to render his judgment – perhaps no one, and for a while he rationalized to say what he wanted to say and make testament his impulse. But that didn’t last. His ideals overreached his discipline, and so throughout his age of arrogance he said a lot of things he didn’t do.

One of his favorite quotes in the history of recorded speech was delivered by a madman named Salvador Dali, and it read – “The only difference between me and a madman is I am not a madman.” He liked this because he often felt himself at a great distance from his own madness, and far above the paralysis of its paranoia. Socializing was not his problem. It was revelation he feared and avoided, generally by laughing the voices away and pretending it was all right that everything important go unheard. Speaking in anecdotal circles, he grew nothing to be severed, and so with age he talked about less important things most of the time. The weather, the team, the job, the health. Safe things. And he hated himself for it.

Soon he lived a life he could barely bear witnessing. Just a perilously long list of tasks that he would never finish, rolling down into holes from which he would never again emerge. His life was worth about what he owed, and besides his creditors, he was the only one watching it happen.

And nobody read.
So why write?

It seemed better than just waiting around to die.

posted by ZHorton at 12:47 PM