A December Interlude

"It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing. The words that I speak to you are spirit, and they are life."

―The Gospel of John

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Dear Kate,

I don't know why this topic middle of December but it is what it is: I want to talk about why I write.

I know full well you don't care much about this, in the sense that you have much else to care about and if you are to hastily run your eyes over these words it's a courtesy more than any friend deserves.  You are a care-full person, as all conscientious being should be.

Something is going on in your world, in everyone's world, a world ongoing, a tautology that chases its own tail and self-perpetuates into one big Of-course that we can't help but call Life.  We don't need to define life: it leaves us with no time or space or energy—no life—to define it, while it steadily defines us as a matter of course.

Why read if it is not for what is useful to life's perpetuating itself necessarily?  You want to change a lightbulb but you don't know how to: well, read up on it.  Look up a YouTube video, that counts as "reading" too.  Do it and do it soon: life depends on it.  No light, no work; no work, no life.  Better get on with it for life to get on with you.  Reading is for life, not the other way around.

There, three convoluted paragraphs to supposedly speak about why I write, only to tell you why I don't need to write.  I am speaking to not speak, writing the next sentence to frustrate the last.  You run on a treadmill everyday, don't you, and necessarily?  You don't run to undo what you run for.  You know the Whys to your Whats, and the Hows are mere technicality and convenience.  Life is no life if it speaks not for what you feel needs being spoken for.

Well, there is nothing worth speaking in Life.  If there is, it would have already been spoken and taken into the clockwork of our Life system to make itself useful for our Cause.  You do realize none of the capital letter proper nouns I mentioned need our pondering: they are moving to their designed and desired purpose, running away from us as they keep running us with the Task to keep laying them like eggs for the Farmer.  To ask who the Farmer is is to question needlessly, and not a wise hen's endeavor in any case.  Healthy hens are able to lay an egg about once a day: I am telling you the truth, scientific truth, about the only sort that we should oil our farm equipment with.

I hope you enjoyed my writing as much as I enjoyed writing it.  Thank you for nothing as you should me the same.  You are free again to enslave yourself with your earlier compulsions.

Yours, Alex