All Good?

Dear Kate,

You told me you've been trying hard to write about the mass shooting(s) in your land but laboring to speak a "more authentic and straightforward tongue."  May I suggest an authentic tongue is never labored and anything going straight out of our face hole is seldom forthcoming?

Unless the face holes are your eyes.

I suggest you don't write until your hands are baptized in your own tears, on the altar of your typing keyboard.  The world can do without another grandstanding posture: get off your pedestal and imagine.

Imagine.  "It's easy if you try," as Lennon claimed.

Imagine your daughter, hours away from you in her college campus, was shot dead last night.  Imagine further before that her suffering wasn't straight as a bullet's path, but meandering in the many depths of hell.  There was violence and there was sex, a magical concoction that - and pretty much only that - would sell any ticket in your land.  We love that shit, and now that shit is really happening.

Now speak.  Tell me what you "think" about such shooting.  Be authentic in your utterance and tell it like it is, honest and human.  Enlighten the world with your keen observation and sensitive analysis.  Quote Dylan too, his words always useful.  If you are strong enough to keep your composure and dignity, people might even ask you to lecture about it, your overcoming of trauma, surviving and thriving, a model citizen more exemplary for your prowess in harnessing the power of words.  You will be a Celebrated Writer - paid well, needless to say.

No one gets off from one's pedestal; we get knocked off.

"The more individuals are destroyed (by processes such as I know) the worse their yearning for collectivity. Worse, because they return to the mass agitated, made fervent by their failure. Not as brethren, but as degenerates. Experiencing a raging consumption of potato love. Thus occurs a second distortion of the divine image, already so blurred, wavering, struggling."

You will yearn for collectivity, if what you imagined was real, rage to consume potato love, the only sort available in our distorted divine image.  You will speak a common tongue and write about gun control, mental health, how the System has failed your daughter, failed you, failed the American Dream.  Someone is responsible - and maybe yourself too, you admit, being a self-aware Human and self-conscious Writer - and it is time to talk about responsibility, law and order, stuffs we can't do without to stay "together."  You will raise the question of theodicy (why a good God would permit bad things and indulge bad people) among the Christians smarts, finally having the credential like a certificate to speak philosophically.

It's not all bad, wouldn't you say?  We the educated, literate - no, literary! people; we have words to spin a better tale, make sense of it all.

It's worse than all-bad.

A real writer always knows he is speaking about the unspeakable, yearning for something better than all-good.

Yours, Alex