Tuesday, March 08, 2005

after

And so it settles on me now, grimly final. What we do as writers, before our typewriters and our keyboards and our notepads, is something that can only be done alone. It's a form of communication that is more like masturbation than anything else. We scream, silently, hoping that someone is listening, that someone is taking note of the words, of the rage and the disgust and the disgrace.

But you never know. How can you know?

At the end of the day, they're just words on a page. Words that break down into sounds and into letters and into nothing but grunts and groans.

And how is this different from the desires we had a hundred years ago? A thousand? That we might grunt, and be noticed, and be heard, and change the tribe somehow.

But the tribe never changes. Evolution is a farce. We fool ourselves in thinking that this about improvement or evolution. We are worse for our history -- a species that is devouring itself out of a hunger for progress.

I joke sometimes that I would like to be alive a hundred years from now, two hundred, to be in a position to watch our inevitable destruction, but I don't want that. I couldn't stand that. Better I leave this world still beliving that we might somehow turn things around, in spite of it all, in spite of those with a fanastic appetitite for everything that is good and pure in the world.

Because it isn't so much that I don't believe that things can get better. It's that I don't believe we, as a species, have the strength to pull it off.

And that, my friends, is infinitely worse.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

A