the good writers

All the good writers came from the desert.

a solitary man, comfortably residing in populated silence and seizing the opportunity his desolate position affords him. Finding no time for counting the seconds, letting them instead flit past his feet like innumerable ants to be employed as faithful allies in his diligent fight against the industrious current that sweeps all things across the sand. In isolation a man is free to be whatever he wishes, so long as his aspirations leave room for the truth that he is alone.

All the good writers live in the desert.

laying face down on the tabernacle slab of an unwritten story, in unwatched bliss, he preserves in darkness all that is unseen to be enjoyed at a later time in a light of his own design.
Unwed appetites pop into and out of existence, not bound by the guilt born of a matrimonial obligation to the pen and so they are free to come and go as they please. Unfed ideas, gaunt and slim, they are marginal in the face of inspirations raw abundance. Yet it is she that fattens up all those vagrant bodies emaciated by distance and proves herself to be the beckoning source around which all of them come to orbit. Eventually compelled by her, but never commanded, to give eternal pause to their explorative struggles and take aim down the uncharted course and birthplace of demise and decay which ultimately leads them to the spring from which they fountained.

All the good writers have stayed in the desert.

thrown out of their villages, towns and cities, banished from the supple productivity of their homes, disowned by spouses, hated by family, the bane of friendship and jeered at by mere common folk. Loneliness is forced upon them, but they discard it as soon as they are alone. They suffer greater things for the greatest purpose for reasons which can never be known. They bear their task of measuring words against all those things that can easily be held within their hand. An endless task achieved only where the sun stands still, and so they remain still, bound to the empty desert. Breaking every fragile rule they are eventually only governed by that which cannot be bent or broken. They are reduced to what is only essential. The severity of their loss, which is accessible only through the severity of their surroundings, will not allow for them to bear a single needless treasure.

All the good writers have died in the desert

All who stay inside the desert eventually run dry and come up empty, transformed into the useless clutter that is devoured and toyed with by the wind-that scavenger of scavengers. And so there is no more, no more bold proclamations, no more attempts to tattoo complicated images on the skin of unclothed giants, no more endeavors to build time consuming monuments intended only to sing praise to the provider of dreams. Now there is only music, food, dance and unwinnable games of war and chance. The warrior race is enslaved by six figure wages. Having then beat their swords and shields into stock shares they see no need to fight that which they can profit from with mergers. And what of the women who inflated all the mens passions, driving them out to perform unreasonable deeds--they have all made vows of their own and too their children, dutifully pretending not to be encumbered with the job of protecting the future.

The desert is lost.

it has been turned into a city, set alight by the blaze of neon and animated by a fire made servile with greed and then set to the dreary toil of consuming fossils. So it is that with zealous indulgence we destroy the past. The combed and manicured hedgerows of steel and glass just barely conceal any last trace of a genuine memory of a place where time did not matter, even as its disfigured remains are the very ground upon which we found our awkward plight. Blinded by the stares of refracted sunlight, we can no longer chase after the naked heavens. And so we fiddle away in hot pursuit of what might have been and what is surely to return, while we passively tan ourselves like slabs of hide in the blueish glow of german headlamps. If loss came without pain we would surely be damned to a life without life and a life without death. Such an empty life lived only in the service of those who seek to avenge a crime they committed against themselves.