Sunday, January 18, 2004

On Seeing Big Fish

This is why writers write. This is why livers live. This is why the painter paints; this is why the artist in any form sets his energies to the blankness of nothing.

He does it so that he shall be remembered.

Man cannot live alone. He needs someone else there by him, there with him. And so lovers love. And so writers write. And so livers live. And so diers die.

All stories, pictures, lives can be summed up in a few sentences. The story of a life: I lived. Then I died. The story of a painter's painting: I painted. Then I finished my work. The story of the typical fantasy story: An evil arose. It was destroyed.

The realized saying of everything: it was began, and ended.

So why do we choose to make things sound so much more than this? The answer's there if you look hard enough.

A writer, in most cases is a story teller: he tells stories. A painter, in most cases, is a story teller for the eyes: he tells a story with colors and hues and things the eyes can see. A lover is a story teller: he makes his stories with his passion; with the way he kisses his fellow lover, the way they coalesce. Someone who lives as a story to tell: one that is their own-and they make it as they go to their beginning, and get to their end.

It seems to say that since we are still alive, there must be something to live for. But what is it that we live for? We live to be immortal. We live in hopes that we will matter to something so much that it shall remember us. We live our stories so we can become them.

Don't think so? Well, someday you'll find it out. Everything is done in a try at bettering. A writer writes to uplift men's hearts in a personal way that perhaps only the writer will understand. In each thing a writer writes, in each character he creates, in each fiction, there is fact. Fact and fiction go along together.

In each writer's writing there is himself, staring back, like an askew mirror. Writers write to immortalize themselves, and others, and their lives. They write in hopes that someday, somehow, their writing will be read by another--that perhaps they will be moved by it--that perhaps what this writer has written (which is, in fact, himself, only in an askew way) matters. That perhaps this writer himself mattered.

All our lives we go fishing when it's not fish we're looking for. What we're looking to do is to become seamless with the water which we fish in. If time is a river we go a-fishing in, then we just need to understand this river. We need to know how it works. We need to see how we can live past ourselves.

And so we live, try to find this. And so we love, try to feel this. And so we write, try to say this, try to put down in words that cannot be destroyed ourselves in a way which is much more appealing than ourselves. With writing we are able to make ourselves as we wish we were--multi-faceted--ordinary, not ordinary, strong, intellectual, ignorant, understood, not understood. Through writing we create. And we destroy. Through writing we can become alive forever. Through writing we can weave stories so that some day, some time, we can become these stories. So that we can become what we wish we were.

If you cannot tell yourself that why you live is to live longer, then you are being a fool. The reason we live is to try and find reason--and during this time we seek to make ourselves live longer than we can.

Fostering our children, we put ourselves in them. So it is the same with an artist who paints, draws, writes, plays athletics. We wish to put ourselves into anything we can that will make us larger than we are and one day was.

How you live is how you live. But do not lie to yourself and say against what is nature--for it is nature to want to be bigger than you are. For why else would we, as writers, create a plethora of characters which are actually forms of us and others who matter to us? For why else would we, as humans, give birth to our children?

It is because we want to be bigger than we are. We want to be what we wish we were--so we weave our creations.

And someday, far away, we'll look back on it all, and realize what we have made is what we have become.


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