A Kind of Madness

I’ve settled upon a few things about writing and reading and they are like imprints I can feel … breath and heartbeat on my walk, smooth stones in my lungs … and they take in everything that I can see and think, everything that is real

Voice is the key to writing, on the wire, in the wind as the Indian Nations listen to pole and track … falling upon the ground in disbelief, dying suddenly, asleep, a great sadness, as if all the blood in the world has vanished across some threshold unknown to me

Style is more important than content, just ask the sun in the sky, a unique style gives one the confidence to refashion birth and death with cotton candy and endless spoons

Honesty over truth, since no one knows the truth, particularly people who were there, hurt in those lost moments, so far away, dense in the petrified woods like figures trapped in the night of all nights

Truth is in the reading, not in the writing, and each pair of eyes has its own reality of dreams and suffering and mistakes, happiness and new found friends and who among us is foolish enough to believe that love conquers all and death has no dominion

No one reads anymore and the black pearls on the thread connect us all together … dreams, spoken stories in the firelight, prophecies, confirmation bias like our meal of raw meat and picked berries and we know what to expect, because we expect it, and there it is

Surely I would die if I could not read or write and I have decided that writers are generally more crazy than other artists, more than the painters and musicians, more than the sculptures and the photographers, the dancers and the actors, the masters of cloth, print making, film … other artists are not so troubled by the constant voice that cuts into flesh, the unstoppable stream that causes writers to bleed upon the bed, take notes at the graveside, smile as if they meant it

Can one be a great writer and a good person … I think not … regret, guilt, pain, denial, lies, redemption and desperate love are at the heart of great art, and it is hard to write about killing someone unless you have killed someone, and if you have not loved to the point of hyperventilation, then how do you write about love, and if you are not possessed by these things, these human emotions and criminal, immoral acts, then you can’t find your voice and if you can’t find your voice, then you can’t be honest, and you remain unfulfilled, and you do not darkly suffer and long for the life and exhilaration of words like scraps tossed to dying dogs in the street

This I know …