Literature is not dead; literature is stillborn
A Case Against Literature
I wish to make love to humanity, of every race, all ages, both sexes, across the face of the earth, through writing, in the potency of language. I am an aspiring writer, a lover of language. Making love to humanity, body, mind, and spirit, through language that is eloquent as silence, rolls off the tongue, carries sublime thoughts, clothed in expressions that are natural, borne out of the sublimity of the thoughts, is, I believe, my calling. Every time I sit before my notebook, I offer prayer that each word I write, upon meeting the gaze of the reader, spring to life, like phoenix, grow wings, fly up to their being, caress them, close off their senses to the din, glare of the world, and transport their spirit to bliss.
I believe in the redemptive power of language, that our salvation from our predicaments in life lies in it, in finding sublimity in language, that awakens the spirit inside us, open our eyes to the spiritual umbilical cord that binds us all together and with the environment around us; reminds us that our infinite power lies in our wholeness and that we are laid feeble in our detachment from one another and our environment — and that is why the world bullies us around; language that whispers memories into our ears of times before the beginning of time, when we were pristine thoughts in our Creator’s mind, yonder, in the wonderland, our eternal home.
I am no great lover though, as you, the reader, from your experience of reading thus far, can easily tell. My writing is impotent. The words I eke out take but only a few millimetres off their page and fall right back on their faces.
Obsession to grow into that lover, as obsessions often do, played a strange dream, or rather a hallucination, in my head last night. In the dream/hallucination, I was sleeping when a spirit roused me from my slumber, hurried me over to the balcony, instructed me to look outside. The spectacle my eyes met outside almost made me jump out of my skin: thronged on the street in front of my house, like the hair on my head, were all human beings on the face of the earth.
Have you ever imagined awaking to find oneself precariously standing on a tightrope hundreds of miles above hard, rocky ground? That was what being put on that spot felt like.
In my fright, I jumped back, motioned to flee away, disappear behind the walls. The spirit barred my way.
“What does THIS mean?” I cried, wide-eyed.
“Your dream,” the spirit spoke, in starkly expressionless tone.
She said that she summoned all the human inhabitants, from the four corners of the world, including the bedridden and women in delivery, with the promise of being made love to, that would fill them with bliss.
“But I can’t,” I beseeched, “I am impotent”.
The spirit would not listen and let me be.
Before I knew it, I was standing over the balcony again. There they were, my fellow beings, infinite, mute, looking on, their mouth parting.
“But what do I say to them,” I whimpered.
I could not think of anything to say of import to the occasion to save my soul much as I was willing to throw myself over them and take the silent scourge of the world on my back. It occurred to me that whatever I said, however I said it on the spot was apt to turn off a chunk of the human race, for there was no accounting for their myriad tastes.
In my heightened distress, I dropped unconscious.
Thinking about it now, in retrospect, however, I cannot help but feel that putting writers and their work on the spot before the world was the editorial system our writing market needs. A writer would never have the courage to step forward with anything but work that they have put every ounce of their being in producing, for standing there, under immediate, innumerable, impartial scrutiny, one has nothing to hide behind save one’s own sincerity. A writer cannot afford to let mediocrity seep into their work, for they cannot survive the humiliation they would incur if otherwise just as a person who falls off a tightrope hundreds of miles above hard, rocky ground cannot. That would clear out the cheap, bland literature that proliferate the market.
I digress. In any case, when I reopened my eyes, after God knows how long, I saw the spirit still standing over the balcony. I pulled myself up and cautiously peered down the balcony. I was relieved to find that sanity had returned to the world, the familiar sight of people going about their day to day life, like factory items moving along conveyor belt on packaging machine to be packed. The irony of my feeling relieved to be back to the reality I yearned to change dawned on me.
“These people,” said the spirit, without looking towards me, pointing to the passers-by, “had dreams too, dreams of making love to the world, in their own ways, of effecting change, at some points in their lives. But the system smothers the dream out of them and with their dreams effectively drawn out, they fall back in line with the system”.
“Why are you here?” I asked, impatient.
“You have a question you pray the spirit world to answer,” she rejoined.
“I do not have a question. I have a wish,” I sighed, “the wish to write, to write love, in all its purity, grandeur and communicate it to my fellow beings, in language that is in rhythm with their heartbeat. If only you could lend me the art”.
“Answers to wishes do not come in gift packs as gifts, but as directions to the wish,” she explained.
“Pray give me the direction!” I exclaimed.
“The tragedy of humanity is,” the spirit spoke, “that you severe from the organic, whole phenomenon in the universe of your existence a tiny part that you can perceive and interact with in your conscious state and take that as the whole. As a result, you create around yourself the semblance of exercising full control over the whole phenomenon. The arrogance of ignorance”.
“The same is true with language,” she went on, “language is but a surface, shallow, direct, and inferior part of the larger phenomenon called communication. The greater part of communication, intrinsic to language lies outside language. You also communicate in your actions and inactions, feelings and thoughts”.
“What has all this got to do with my wish,” I could not hold back my impatience.
The spirit turned to face me and looked me in the eye.
“Seek eloquence not just in language, but in the way you communicate with your whole being, for true eloquence is eloquence in the whole communication.
“What in the world is eloquence in — communication?” I interrupted.
“Eloquence in communication is congruence of one’s actions, thoughts, feelings with one’s ideals,” she replied.
“The most sublime literature humanity has ever produced in the entirety of its existence is the lives of its most exalted persons. Helen Keller. Mother Teresa. Jesus. Gandhi. Martin Luther King Jr,” she explained, “These were men and women who made self-less love to humanity”.
“Communion with your fellow beings, body, mind, and spirit, of the magnitude you aspire, can only be attained through eloquence in communication through your whole being,” the spirit asserted.
I expressed my confusion.
“You see, everyone is a writer — you are in a perennial act of writing your book in the way you communicate through your whole being. One does not need to address this deeper communication to an audience, nor certainly write them in books, for they are written in the air. Every time people breath, they take in the communication with the air”.
The spirit paused, studied my face. “‘Life is a tale told by an idiot,’ only if you let it be, if you do not discipline it to your principles, to your ideals,” she added.
“If your life does not enjoy great readership at the moment, it is only because it is still lacking in eloquence, that this is symptomatic of the level of incongruence of your acts and thoughts and feelings with your ideals,” she contended.
“I don not exactly aspire to be an exemplar, an enlightened soul, a prophet,” I objected, “I just want to write truth, beauty”.
“You cannot write what you are not,” she countered, ‘the Good Book says, ‘out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks’. The same can be said about writing. The inspired soul put it best who said, “sublimity is the echo of a greatness of soul’. To attempt to write sublimity when you are not sublime is an attempt at contriving it, and the writing to greater or lesser extent invariably falls short. All literature is but these attempts by writers at contriving the sublimity that they are not in writing. Consequently, all writings are stilted, ingenuine, cliché, melodramatic, predictable, transient”.
The spirit stopped. She turned her face towards outside. “Quit spending hours before your notebook, and go out there, act, be — write sublime life. Should you still feel the need to articulate the sublimity you will have learned to exude at all level of your being, if that be your calling, as it was the calling of such great persons as Jesus and King Jr, rest assured that the sublime soul will dictate the words”.
With that the spirit disappeared into me and I woke up with a gasp.
