She’s done: Catharsis

There is something about the writer that is forever the exhibitionist; an apologist for himself and an exhibitionist for the world. Rooted in the act of transcription writing is forever an unveiling, a revealing of one world to another. It is in the act of writing that we reveal ourselves to ourselves. It transcends or hopes to transcend time; through print, space; if we are lucky it transcends the frailty of personality. In writing, communicating an internal sense of reality to an external audience, we fulfill what is quintessentially human – the need for community, sharing. By sharing our internal world, free from the impositions and facades of everyday life, writing extends our subjectivity by creating an object from ourselves that is other than ourselves. It is a neurotic function of kinesthetics and imagination that creates a visual representation of neuro-electrical impulses cascading through a network of gelatinous flesh. Ultimately it reveals our need for control. This peculiar practice of graphically representing the idea of consciousness creates, for the human animal, the myth of continuity and re-affirms the illusion we call time. It makes us more than bodies of periodic motion bounded by gravity in a centripetal spiral toward immolation. Writing, to some degree, is redemptive. It forms our being, our existence in this world, into something more than a futile struggle against death. It crafts our aspirations and vanity into something more elegant, transcendent – beautiful. Writing forges from the brutish and short barbarity that we call life an object, at times, that is resonant, harmonious and true. In writing we create the record of our existence against which some truth can be uttered. Not on our behalf but on behalf of the witness, the reader, the participant and finally, the indulgent. Writing provides the foundation against which a verdict, ver dictum – a true speaking, can be pronounced. Writing, for better or worse, reveals the ordeal we call our lives.

Cyrus