Why Good Writing Matters -- Now, More Than Ever

All my life, I've been a lover of language. The story in my family was that I learned to talk early and then never shut up, talking up a blue streak to anyone who would listen (and often to plenty who didn't). Well, my rising sign is Gemini, so I come by it honestly, I suppose. As soon as I learned to read, I began to devour books, literally reading every book in the children's section of the little public library in Four Corners. My mother's most frequent instructon to me was, "Put down that damn book and [do some chore that she wanted the oldest girl of five children to do]." I love all kinds of writing: rhetoric, speeches, quips, and, of course, maybe best of all, poetry.

One of the things that I love best about good writing is its ability to recall for us our better selves, to remind us of who we really are. It's as if we can take what we only really know about ourselves in those few hours when we are truly ourselves and store those feelings by writing them down, making them accessible to us in the many more hours when the business of life makes us forget. Years before I knew anything at all about Wicca or magic, I learned the incredible power of just writing down my vision of what I wanted my life to look like, of imagining on paper what a perfect day would look like for me in a month, a year, a decade. Many Wiccans and thamaturgists define magic as the ability to change consciousness at will. That's what good writing can do for us. Change our consciousness at our will, by recalling us to who we really are, to what world we really live in.

One of the great dangers of this world is our tendency to allow other people to define the world and, thereby, ourselves for us. My sun is in Pisces, so perhaps I'm even more fraught with the tendency to allow this to happen than are many others, but it seems to me to be one of the greatest dangers of living and of getting older. The voice of our Better Self can be so quiet sometimes and the voices of the rest of the world can be so loud. But it's the most important thing of all: to cling to what we know about who we are and what the world is and to screen out all of the noise that tries to overpower that knowledge. When I was in law school I took Contracts from a Crazyman. I don't remember much of what he tried to teach me about contracts, but I've never forgotten something that he said to the class the night before our first ever law school exam: after explaining that exams would be graded on the curve and that this meant that many people would be getting their first-ever "C"s, he said, "But don't let that define you. Don't ever let anyone else define you to yourself. Don't ever believe that you are the grade that someone else gives you."

Perhaps I'm the only one who sees the connection between what I've just been saying and what I'm about to say, but, for me, they're completely intertwined. I came home last night so broken by the Senate's abandonement of habeas corpus and embrace of torture that I couldn't stand it. I was literally in pain. My heart physically hurt; I felt as if I'd been kicked in the stomach. I felt worse than I felt when the Bush junta stole the election from Kerry. Worse than I felt when Roberts and Scalito waltzed into the Supreme Court. Worse than I felt when I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Worse than I felt when my marriages fell apart. The world, it suddenly seemed to me, was a darker and more horrible place than I'd ever imagined. All of my hopes for helping to create a better world seemed like vanities and nonsense. I felt weak, ineffective, anachronistic, unfit to live in such a world. I could literally feel a dark, heavy wave of evil and hatred flooding west from the Capitol, over my home and on towards the rest of the world.

Blogging seemed pointless, perhaps even foolish, waving a red flag for the jebuzites who can't wait to start torturing the witches again. Political activism seemed a waste of time and energy. Donating money to good causes looked like a waste. My hopes for saving at least some of the Earth and civilization from global climate change appeared dashed. Maybe what I really needed to do was figure out how to liquidate everything and convince my family to relocate to another country. Maybe what I needed to do was to find a very sharp knife and begin running warm water.

Then, this morning, I read Athenae.

Thank you, Athenae. Your wonderful writing did for me what great writing does. It reminded me that the Bush junta does not, no matter how dearly they might wish it to be so, create reality. They are not going to define the world in which I live nor are they going to define me. I'm going, as you suggest, to take this bodyblow and then I'm going to get back up. I differ from you in that I don't think Diebold will allow a Democratic victory this Fall, although I'm going to work for one. Nor do I agree with Atrios that just getting shrill (and as a mouthy, opinionated woman, believe me, I've been called shrill!) is going to be enough. I think it's going to take pitchforks and torches. I think it's going to take people -- lots and lots of people -- willing to pledge "our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor." But you know, whatever it takes, that's what I'm going to do.

And I'm going to do it because of who I am and what the world is and because I am not the naive and powerless anachronism that the Bush junta wants me to believe that I am and the world is not the evil, dark, vile place that they want me to believe that it is. So, I'm going, as Atheane urges, to get back up. You come, too.

For Runnymeade!