I thought millions of words would make a difference, so I joined the army of writers and made them, year after year. An article here, an essay there. A poem. A book, a short story. Ephemeral scribblings like this one. All of them crawled from the writhing places inside myself to the edge of the world’s river of text and jumped in and created that rush of ideas while being carried by it. They roared and purred, offered me sweet drownings or the peace of a vision of movement, concepts shimmering like a pond’s skin as the sun surrenders.
There was light and noise and surely no one could see or hear evil well enough amid such music to learn and inflict the ways of hatred. Surely a story of murder would stop the next one, surely beasts would turn sweet feasting upon poetry.
I wrote and wrote and wrote. Wrote to exorcise loss but I knew I was trying to invite suffering in, to make room for it, to carve space inside myself using the hard edges of words to remove the rotten, the unwise, the selfish.
The light left after the surgery was mine. It was small. But joined with the others, it was plentiful, powerful, something you might call a sun.
Foolish to think readers would be transformed by words as authors are. Foolish to hope. Foolish to believe in doing something after hearing that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.
War grinds life away, hatred rests like a crown on the ruler’s skull, and laughter accompanies violence. Grifters and charlatans claim power and use it to destroy without reason or right.
All the plentiful light. It isn’t gone. But it is shrunken. Not by withering, but by the revelation that the darkness is bigger than anyone thought. It is not a room, but a house, a city even. Maybe even the world, but no bigger than that. It has a limit. It is not infinite. We can fill it, all of it, with light. It is all we can do, must do, even if we know it may not matter. We must see the horrors the worst among us commit so there is a chance they are not committed.
Words may never birth change. But they make it possible. Words may never mean anything. But they will occupy the darkness, make it uninhabitable for those who would use it to hide rather than rest.