~

Writing is like watching the wind over a dark river, like bathing squirrels in a tub of jello, or making love to a passionate seamstress. Of course it is. It's also like scraping your knees on concrete, picking scabs, or lying naked mid-December in a Minnesota cornfield.

Writing seems to be the most elusive of art forms. I approach the subject like I would a screaming child or a water moccasin. Writing has always approached me like the stranger in a cold dark alleyway.

Sometimes I fear writing; the bursts of language that spin me across a page and leave the dizzy shock of realization. The dull ache of an unexposed and barely known idea not yet freed from the vision's slavery. Syntactical brush-strokes filling a blank white page and howling for meaning. Stringing words like tenuous ornaments on a naked tree to be exposed amidst dewy night. Each word somehow a stone cast against the intangible moment of truth, unwilling servants in the dark work of illumination.

Writing feels to me like archaeology not confined to uncovering only what has become obscured over time. There remains the possibility of uncovering what never was, or rather, what was never known...never articulated. Bringing to life undiscovered worlds or notions, showing people maybe a kind of life that had been, or a way of seeing that isn't yet. It is my unearthing of peculiar small towns in North Dakota, or the contents of a mind, meeting characters and revealing strange circumstances, or discovering the essence and feel of some place that brings meaning for me to the stringing together of words.

Although I brush up against the solitary and floundering aspects of laying words on paper, a mood that tags along with my writing is being in love with the process as well as the results. A state of mind which brings an openness to information, like channeling a strange force, finding the 'other' and expressing it meticulously with each letter.

On the dark compass of my soul there are few things that seem to remove the lodestone more that writing does. Writing is a road that I travel endlessly, a less certain affair than say, building houses, waging war, or selling popcorn, but a road paved nonetheless with words, ideas, and ethereal concepts where I can push the edge out further and yet keep a direction in mind. It is a craft that I choose for its potential. A craft not defined by physical law, but an evolving race of ideas which shape our perception of the world.

When I stare at a page filled with words and divine their meaning, when I write the most beautiful line I have ever written, when I unearth the essential metaphor, when I see complete expression, then I realize that I'm among meme traders. That for my words perhaps houses will be built differently, or that we will cease to wage war, or even that a man or woman selling popcorn somewhere will sell it with a slightly greater smile, look of amusement, more or less butter, depending. I realize that what the world is really made of is language, and to be among those who trade in words and ideas is to walk on the road of fortune, to join the makers, and those who will craft the future one word at a time.

---

Original Photo