Serve The Idea

Or: Literary populism flattens the earth.

There are quivering charlatans.

Leaking poison o’er the muse’s head. Webbing our tongues in laws spun from embarrassments. “Confusing words are bad!” they write. “Optimize your language for simple consumption!” they preach. They doth protest too much. Orthodoxies of convenience. Avoid them at all costs. They are poison to the daemon. Envoys of dead success.

Serve the idea.

The unborn yearns for its figure. Each ineffable moment desires its enchanted form. If it wants itself shouted, do that. Or, if whispered, that. If both...that again. If it wants itself simple and spare or flowery and opaque—oblige, oblige, oblige. Serve the idea.

Beware the beast.

“Write for the audience you want”, these petty merchants peddle, lancing our boil. Boil! Cut the greased loop of feedback bottling your neck. That thing flattens the delicate frays of oddity, the big bad mistakesasdj. It converges on banal bananas. It’s true. Sad… but true. Studies and such. Homogeneity qua popularity—audience capture. That beast throbs neurotic. It desiccates moments, guts ‘em, starving the norm deviations responsible for idiosyncrasy, surprise, and phenomenological dynamism. Dogshit.

Prepare for vesselhood.

Emptied, cleared, the muted shapes fly fast thru us. Flooding our fingertips. Tap, tap tap, bang, bang! Look curiously upon what is birthed. Each is an animal in the wait. You are its excavator and celestial resurrector. What animal? Has it sprouted a wing? Then find its spine, its sinew, its skin. Do not burden one animal with another’s bones. Does it move? Then loose it upon the world. May it consume the consumer.

Readiness is a seizure.

Why cast another polished cadaver upon the world. Perfection is not readiness. Readiness breathes. Perfection is finished. It will be ready before it is finished. The most affective ideas always are. Mastery is knowing when to stop.

Serve the idea.