the omniverse: January 2010

A writer's job is to watch, to see. We are voyeurs. We steal from others, from who they are. We steal from ourselves. We are hungry and ruthless, never satisfied, always wanting more. Always searching for another way in which someone might reveal themselves to us without knowing it.

We are promiscuous. Everything has a possible use, from the greatest tragedies to the most intimate moments. We enter every experience as a writer searching for material.

It is a writers job to remember. Not the color of the sky or the way she wore her hair, but the full import of the event. Its heart, its most tender passage. It is our job to live within the moment we create. Everything we might steal from others we also lay bare within ourselves.

It is part of the job to extend our own suffering, not to suppress it but to allow it to flower into full bloom so that it might be seen and fully experienced. Not just the suffering we are comfortable with (because we are all comfortable with some suffering), but the sorrows we avoid or run from. It is our job to allow those terrors to become completely real.

We trade in the ecstasies of living, of seeing every feature possible; we steal the joy of others but also their misery. We steal who they are but we give them a name.

We are the witnesses to every act we can imagine. The witnesses to our own joys and transgressions and the ways in which we move those through the world. We are the witnesses of Now. Right Now. Now.

I want a literature in which people are trying to find their own worlds, trying to enter them, develop a faith in them. In which people are trying to find other people whose world resonates or coincides with their own in such a way that something can happen between them. I want a literature of search, of faith, of terror and beauty; one in which people may succeed or fail but they are reaching out toward something.

I want a literature of small events which linger. A literature in which something glanced on the street by chance may be more important than years in a person's life. In which two or three words, or a glance, or a touch, takes on more prominence than a career or a degree. In which relationships may be inexplicable but true nonetheless; in which we may constantly tell ourselves we don't know what we are doing, yet we are doing nonetheless; in which an element of love does not just bring pleasantness and comfort but the actual material we need to shape who we are; in which true understanding is hardly ever spoken but is known nonetheless.

It is the writer's job to listen. In restaurants, on the street, in the grocery store. To everyone, to each distinct voice and its cadence, its memory, its life.

It is our job to observe, free from judgment, free from meaning. To see only what is there and nothing else.

It is our job to notice the tenderness of a mother bending to her child, a lover's hand upon a knee, a spontaneous laugh.

It is our job not to know, to suspend knowing, in the service of observation. It is our job not to know even what we are doing.

We use the world in every terror and jubilation. We feel things, think things, which don't belong to us. We devote ourselves to condensing all of human experience through the ages down to just one thing: this page.

It is our job to see. To listen. To remember. To celebrate and to mourn.

To quieten ourselves, slowly, patiently, cycling down into a single still point within which our experience might speak.

Then, to sit before the page, as white as a open field of fresh snow, and mark out a path.