If You Want to be Immortal
This may sound strange or utopian. But let me quote a few sentences from an Indonesian writer, namely Pramoedya Ananta Toer:
“One can be intelligent as high as the sky, but as long as he does not write, he will be lost in society and from history. Writing is work for immortality”
After several decades since Pram’s departure. His thoughts kept echoing. It’s just that in Indonesia, the locus of Pram’s work was born, it hasn’t received a serious study, at least in the field of lower secondary education.
Somehow Pram interprets immortality. What is an eternity for the little people, as we know, are the main topics throughout Pram’s work: the history of colonialism, oppression, power relations, romance wrapped in malice to rebellions that are almost raging here and there.
Or fighting to grasp the substance in the chaotic crossroads of discourse, information, fractures, subtle changes that cover up reality. While writing is a way of an embodiment of apocalypse in capturing the substance?
Or perhaps a work passed down to the next generation? Through memory, appreciation, study, and in-depth reading as a tribute to the work. Of course, solid works contain a discourse.
At this point, a discourse that, if believed to be true, will be dangerous. Because it establishes a canon and demands mimetic action for writing standards. But we know, writing is not an activity dictated by it, but a productive and transformative act: turning seeds into waves but still dissolving in the ocean.
Likewise, because ideas don’t always stick in the heads of great writers. Writing is not a matter of means and ends, but of being authentic. The case that work can attach historical traces to other authors is legitimate to break.
That’s when the dominant culture loses its reference. To cultivate experimental life into a field full of creativity, writing is the movement of the muscles of the body, a metabolism in processing the infinite human experience.
Writing means going beyond. Enrichment of his life, again and again, let go of structural hegemony to keep on living after his death.
