Seer

Writing feels like becoming a god sans power or even prestige.

At least the gods have an ultimate essence about them, whether speed or lightning. Still, they’re rather isolated in their act or dwelling: ultimate, with an eagle’s nest lonely.

As the writer you have neither power nor distinguishable merit. But you could slot them along every spirit in each element (as one imagines the ice cave and maiden waiting) so they must pass each hour alone. Together.

No one knows what they’re doing, how it’s going, most of them, even the author, but if you just let it unravel so it orchestrates. Bring into clarity all obfuscated: if not in truth, then subconscious emotional states.

I read a comment the other day, thought about it a bit, and in some ways it was true, it hit right:

Writing is a passion for those who believe that they have already lost in the real world, the state of atrophy that usually follows the end of a passion —decaying, exhausted, temperamental

Sure, there’s an underlying despondency. I was ready to concede the state entirely.

And yet as the Verses started twisting about my limbs I knew that everything, even my conclusions, are of a leviathan infected about. The monster laughs as it inflicts its chains. And as the words squirm down my arms so I can take a pen and add a verse more, however many more, and maybe let it slither back between an occipitalis sinew and sinews more. Even if my body is filled with maggots and dialectic mis-steps so one can condense and light the path ahead.

To hang up everything, honestly, fall to the gravel and feel out whether there’s something more left in all of the souls dragging behind. Fog setting in, souleaters in the distance.

There’s nothing to defend you, nothing to hide behind, the same as gods sustaining their existence, praying to no one, though you can try to pull out the wisdom of other authors, remind which cultural milieu animates you. Eventually you reach Death, appraise his satchel of souls, sit about the purgatory diner. Face what it means. Is there even a place for you?

Across so is your simulacra of all the things you’ve said and thought in, didn’t think further, however many gaps or missing father figures. Experience and mind-by-word condensed into form. All wobbly patrons and skeletons, waitresses rotting, thoughts dropping off. Deep, deep expiration of all ideas sloshing as slime and ossifying into end-of-life programs around chair legs. Checker tile.

In our Modernity every prior belief is deprecated.

Here is our corrosive oasis, do you think it’ll stay this way? So the masters collude the new religions with each sentence and news bit… while one tries to keep a mind stitched together. Press those temples in to hope one can smush all of the parasites and wires and programming.

Because only in writing can one forge the environment most suitable when all around you is a poisonous wasteland.

Make a new version, and spite everyone hoping to dig into your skull.