What the Writer Is

This thought struck me in the shower and I let the water run a few moments more in appreciation;

A writer is everything that the mind can construct. The writer is a construct. Why? How? Sounds like useless philosophy but read on and see if our reasonings shall not converge.

If perchance your mind shall tell you ‘A writer is an artist’, this is true. Because if there is a work of art that the writer told you about, he would have to do it with words. To capture the intensity, each sentence will be a brush stroke, adorning in plenty words the bold, thick impasto of Rembrandt, sprinkling with softly different and colourful pieces the separated unison of Picasso’s collage and finally shading with nuanced words the same passion with which Springinklee tinted ‘Man of Sorrows’ in chiaroscuro.

                 

Sorry, I don’t like big words and I feel to apologetically explain that ‘impasto’ refers to thick paintwork, bringing up the sense of ‘paste’. Collage is a better word to understand and means glued-together. Chiaroscuro is easily taken as a blend of light and shade.

The writer is all that in an artist before art makes sense to you in a lettered description.

He also is a lawyer. He states claims. This is direct. Nothing of the writer is understood without some here-forceful, some there-persuaded writing of the legalist. If he must defend a statement, or rebutt an idea, if he is to refer to the letters before him on which basis he forms his prejudices, he must convince us – all this while, still finding the words that weave the tapestry (ah, even then the writer is a weaver)!

What is the writer else? Every concept that man ever thought of, every dream man ever dreamt or vision he ever saw, that is the writer. Because these are just wisps of smoke prone to sudden flight and lost understanding until the writer shall cap that mist in a bottle, give it shape and sell it back to us refined. He gives our thoughts a body.

What is the writer not? The only thing the writer is not is a writer. For there can be no writer whose only work was to write if there wasn’t some other existence that his writing sought to portray. That existentialism about which he writes, existed before he became a writer or he will have nothing to write.

I have succeeded in putting my thoughts in a dress, which came to me nude under the running of the shower. What have I become? Right here before your eyes, this writer has become a philosopher and while speaking philosophies he himself does not profess to understand, has become the garment-maker and outfitter for a naked proposition.