Words on a page.
What are they but the fleeting thoughts of one human being
capturing a moment in time for the eyes, and minds, of another?
We are judged today, not so much by the way we treat others,
but by the things we say. And even
more so by the words we put on a page.
They live on beyond us, and apart from us. A writers words can be used against him, to indict him, to
judge the entirety of his, or her, life by a few brief thoughts, whether they
be well thought out conclusions, or meaningless frivolity inadvertently tossed
about like scraps of bread to the birds.
It doesn’t matter. They are
given equal weight by the aberrant, and abhorrent, arbiters of righteousness;
and by the pseudo-intellectual, infernal purveyors of social media, and other
similar smut.
Same difference I suppose.
And those words on a page? They are used against
the writer as often as not. That’s
the way it is with some whose main objective is to satiate their own need for
superiority. They are quick to
dismiss the thoughts of those who actually think them, those who have put time
and reasoning into them, those who quite often have something of lasting value
to say. Ideas critics would not
have even entertained, or had the courage to express had they ever had such profound, significant, or
beautiful thoughts themselves.
It takes a certain courage to write. The words are always written with
indelible ink. No getting around
that. Like spoken words, there is
no taking them back. But the written
word is perpetual, eternal if you will.
They outlive the writer and the critic alike. A writers primary intention will often be misunderstood,
exaggerated, compromised, skewed and skewered by the reader. But still he writes. The writer stands naked, vulnerable to
the slings and arrows, the nefarious intentions, of both the aggrieved and the
egregious. But still he
writes. The more
passive-aggressive critics diminish the author with a snide and arrogant
dismissal, as if his thoughts, even, were beneath their own bogus dignity.
But still he writes,
while they are afraid to.
Some critics don’t even bother to absorb and analyze the
meaning of a piece any more. They
just scan until they can pick out what they believe to be a certain ideology of
the writer. They tailor their
comments more to the perceived ideology than to the actual entirety of the
authors expression. They drool at
the mouth when given the opportunity to judge a person by a snippet of their
writing, something (anything really) that can be pounced on like a tiger on
fresh meat. But their assessment
usually amounts to nothing more than the intellectual equivalent of spitting on
the sidewalk. It rarely adds to
the discourse, or to the collective intelligence.
And I say to them, “If you have something to say, write
something beyond your usual 140 characters, or less. And if you have nothing of value to say, well then, continue
to do like you do, and just criticize somebody who does.”
