Appeal to the Writers of the World | ex oratione
She steps onto the lectern. Light static rings outward.
She steps onto the lectern. Light static rings outward.
I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be a writer. That’s not my business.
I should like to gather up my belongings and disappear. Writers,
we all want to create beauty, human beings are like that. We want to sing out, only to be suffocated by our own internal vices. We don’t want to collapse and despise ourselves.
And this world has a room for us all, and the Greats look down upon us with a benevolent eye. The way of creation can be unchained and wonderful, but we have lost our vision. Want of attention has poisoned artist’s souls, has barricaded our minds with hate, has shovelled us into stagnation and misery.
We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Books that once gave us inspiration has left us desolate and sporadic. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.
Our education had made us timid,
Our wit, hard and dull.
We think too much, and feel too little. More than efficiency, we need quality. More than attention, we need introspection and reflection.
Without these qualities art will grow deaf, and all will be lost.
Words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations. They have been out and about, on people’s lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries. And that is one of the difficulties in writing them today — that they are so stored with meanings, with memories, that they have contracted so many famous marriages.
But the very nature of these words cries out for the creativity in writing — cries out for universal understanding — for the beauty of us all.Even now my voice is reaching artists everywhere — millions of despairing men, women and little children — of hidden writers we shall never know.To those who can hear me, I say — do not droop. The misery that is now upon us is but a temporal lapse of unfeelingness — the bitterness of our minds which fears the way of change. The cloud will pass, and the ego dies, and the power they sapped from the pens will return to the pens. And so long as one continues to write, creativity will never perish.
Writers!
Summon all your courage, exert all your vigilance, invoke all the gifts that nature has been induced to bestow. Don’t give yourself to automation— things which despise you — enslave you — which regiment your imagination — tell you what to write — what to think and what to feel! Who block you — starve you — treat you like automatons, use you as fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men — machine men with machine minds and machine hearts!
You are not a body with a mind!
You are not an automaton, a machine without feelings!
You are the embodiment of your soul!
You have the love of humanity in your hearts!
You don’t hate!
Only the unloved hate — the unloved and the unnatural!
In the 16th Chapter of Proverbs it is written: “Gracious words are a honeycomb, sweet to the soul and healing to the bone.” — not the words from one individual, nor a group of them, but in all! In you!
You, the common writers, have the power to write a world free and beautiful, to write this world a wonderful story. Thou art no bird; and no net ensnares thee; a free human being with an independent will is what you are. Then — in the name of literature — let us use that power — let us write
Let us create a new world — a decent world that will give hope to the old, that will invigorate the weary and console the lost. By the promise of these things, mechanicals have risen to power — But they lie!
They do not fulfil that promise,
they never will!
The ego feeds itself but fractures the mind!
Now let us fight to fulfil that promise! Think not of fame!
For very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare!
Let us fight to sing — to do away with blocks and ruts — to do away with perfection, with jealousy and intolerance.
Let us fight for a song of reason and emotion, a song where compassion and beauty will lead to healing of marrow and softening of stone.
Writers!
In the name of literature, let us all unite!
And the rumble of umbrellas are the only sound. And she crinkles the page in her hand. And the rain begins to fall.
Inspired by
~ “Craftsmanship”, Adeline Virginia Woolf (neé Stephen)
~ “Breaking up the Constituent Assembly”, Leon Trotsky (Lev Davidovich Bronstein)
~ “The April Theses”, Vladimir Lenin (Ilyich Ulyanov)
~ “Pericles’ Funeral Oration”, Thucydides
~ “The Final Speech(from the Great Dictator)”, Charlie Chaplain
~ “On Political Morality”, Maximilien (François Marie Isidore de) Robespierre
