Description
It doesn’t matter that I cobble together ideas about womanizing linguistics, make hallucinatory word salads, create poetics about invasive social orders, or write plays about imagined interstellar beings. My offspring, by dint of being mine, have a duty to prize personal growth and to value social contribution over externally assigned accolades. A writer’s sons and daughters might influence a writer, but she affects them, too.
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While neither gigantic starfish nor shrunken behemoths are meant to replace clergy, therapists, or beloveds as guides for self-improvement, fake fauna constitute viable vehicles for processing otherwise unreachable corners of interpersonal conundrums. Simulations are especially important to those among us who need to flee the malfeasance of ostensibly mild-mannered citizens, i.e., from individuals akin to axe murderers or other villains.
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Gone is the era when writers sacrificed profits for principals. These days, most of what gets posted or printed is tripe. Ironically, vanished, too, is the span when writers sacrificed principles for profits. Today, even if authors play strumpets on Naked News, declare an eating disorder on LinkedIn, or snuff baby rabbits on YouTube, no one cares. Most audiences no longer even regale such acts as “performance art.”
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The realm of healthy relationships sits beyond philosophy and rhetoric’s disciplinary limits. It’s useless to assign comparative worth to needy others’ statements and almost always harmful to counsel, rather than to be present as a quiet witness. Additionally, shaming, and other forms of coercion never helped anyone heal but has led to broken friendships and even divorces. There’s a reason why wise ones are relatively silent. “Command” is rarely synonymous with “sagacity.” When strategizing over reactions to other peoples’ tribulations, it’s nobler to be wordless that to spout “eruditions.”
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My use of funky critters is my sugarcoating of social linctuses.
