Writers, Writing, and How Life Continues To Imitate Art... and Its Decline

Writers. I envy Writers. No typo, the capitalization of Writers is deliberate because they are the professionals, the real ones, those who give words a place on a page or a space on a screen. Writers, capitalized, do not merely write or commit the act of writing. They manipulate consonants, vowels, syllables and rhythms to create a song and dance without melody or movement. When I read an article or a novel, that is what I seek: a rhythm. It does not have to entice me or yank me into the plot so that I don't even have a choice as to whether or not I continue on. In fact, I much prefer the work of literature that requires focus, deliberation and perseverance like Faulkner or Hemingway as opposed to the cheeky, unfortunate, romance 'pieces' by Nicholas Sparks, like the one that nearly made me vomit at the mere sight of it in my mother's car today. Pardon the image. I love to get caught in words in the most natural way. Without effort on my part or on that of the author. It is the type of novel, magazine feature, or article that holds you ever so gently like the nonchalant canvas of a hammock. I love the type of writing that you can lay on without grace or purpose and merely sway as your mind wanders, or doesn't, into an oblivion of nonsense and self-directed discourse. Yet, at the same time, there has to be a challenge. It can't just make sense right from the start. I remember my literature teachers before college would always shed a silent grin as the over-confident adolescent grimaces of my peers and I would slowly turn into visages of vulnerability and confusion at a poem's every turn. Or when we read Mask of The Red Death by Edgar Allen Poe in high school and it was completely beyond us that the colors of each room represented the stages of life (I think that's what the metaphor was) until our teacher turned us to the beginning again and guided us through the genius' intellectual jungle. I know that the poetry and prose that I have written is often difficult to comprehend even after a few read-through's for most people. Some may argue, as my first English teacher at Wake Forest did, that I use overblown prose and that my writing is frustrating or pointless. Yet, in my mind art should not be an outline or a scientific diagram of an emotion, situation, or thought. For me, art, or in this case writing, is my means of defining in an abstract form what I feel inside the contours of my body. A quotation from my favorite book as of late, Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife, that epitomizes my outlook on writing. Niffenegger says, "The compelling thing about making art - or anything I suppose - is the moment where the vaporous, insubstantial idea becomes a solid there, a thing, a substance in a world of substances." Without somehow putting what I feel within on paper, a concrete home for an abstract entity, it would all dissipate and cease to exist. That is why I keep a journal, because it is great to look back and see what I felt, even in the most trivial of circumstances, because it is real and true and documented and forever emblazoned on parchment that I can have and hold as long as I can keep it from Earth's more unforgiving elements (like hurricanes, watch it Bill). And that is why I write poetry, to encapsulate a certain sentiment, a list of words that make sense in my mind, and create a dramatic metaphor that distorts or understates an emotion or idea that I hold within so that I can reflect on it in the future and hold it as a reminder that I have felt before and am willing to honor those feelings, no matter how childish and regardless of longevity. I think part of me pities my past self... I feel as though I have been wronged in so many social, interpersonal situations that it is impossible for me to simply move on, forgive, and forget. I know my perils are no deeper or more traumatizing than anyone else's. In fact, I don't even suffer really in the true sense of suffering. Yet, I was born with an artist's mind. An artist's mind was placed within the hollow cavities of a helpless body for one reason and that is to torture the artist until all cobwebs have been cleared from the heart, all fireworks have exploded within the chest, all knots have relieved themselves along the spine, all visions have been cleared of orbs or fuzz, and all breaths have dug to the most unreachable depths of the heart. And yet because we are artists, the spider is relentless, the fireworks are dampened, the knots are forever tightening, our sight is cloudy, and we are perpetually unable to gasp the amount of air necessary to free us from ourselves. And so as we bleed onto notebooks, hollow staffs, and blank canvasses, we toil in the name of our sole goal, our freedom. We cling to our art and we pass with our art. As art declines, as we have seen with the decline in the art of news writing, news delivery, and journalism without .com's and google readers, so do those beacons of perfection that once shined with it. Your art does not have to involve paintbrushes, pens, or instruments. It could involve a ball, a movement, an understanding, a skill. And yet it will perpetuate your existence and manipulate it until you are forever indebted to that art itself and that is when it will take you with it as it falls. Goodnight Faulkner, Goodnight Poe, Goodnight Henry David Thoreau. Goodnight Picasso, Goodnight Manet, Goodnight Cezan and Claude Monet. Goodnight Conkite, Goodnight Hewitt, Goodnight Novak and all who understood him. Goodnight paper, Goodnight fold, Goodnight news of today and of old.