The Unassailable Power of a Book
I believe the book, as a concept / as a receptacle, has unassailable power. That means there is nothing else quite like it. A book is a journey resembling life; the novel is the most openly imaginative and infinitely variable form of storytelling one can undertake. Authors wield unimaginable power within their hands (and words).
There is no budget. There are only the pages and the mind’s expansive meeting of them.
The CIA knows the book is the best propaganda delivery tool, the most concise, efficient, and emotionally compelling. Shamans and priests understand the power of a great story. Modern marketers employ ‘the book’ (as movies, tv, and video games too) as the primary way to deliver storytelling with a firmly satisfactory beginning & ending experience. The book provides Acts, Chapters, Paragraphs, Sentences as segmentation and sequencing to reason our consciousness through and within. Scenes build out with signs and signifiers galore. Stories become vessels keenly built to house ideals and souls equally.
The book is akin to a ship, whether of the sea or stars, built to self-sustain and carry travelers unto merry misadventure.
I am writing books because I believe it is the most important thing I could be doing. By resolving conflicts and synthesizing knowledge and dealing in the dynamic domains of my day, I may see my humane education through to the most thorough ends. I have been blessed with an overactive imagination and a kind of artful restlessness; I try to use my constantly beaming penchant for storying and character study and world-building to create sagas and violences and phantastical encounters worthy of experience. There are visions and worldviews I must share; not all of them are mine and many are not so nice or easy. But each are useful, harrowing, necessary nevertheless.
Books give us pause and they gift us courage. The novel is a continuous enchantment for entertainment, moral reflection, and psychological release. A story, retold or re-experienced, can be a foundational method of self-discovery and world exploration and spiritual exercise all at once. The authorial imagination becomes a psychic weapon for the truly artistic and an affront to The Real outside of you. The author cuts swaths through obscurity and falsehood and should outline his days as such, if not his pages too. The novelist must take chances with ambiguity and non-linear narrative intuitions and listen always to his characters’ impulses and improvisations, even when they clobber the careful scaffolding and shuffle the house of cards anew.
I am writing fantasy x sci-fi x horror because these genres afford me the ability to bend reality to my exacting will. I am cursed to create without end; I am fortunate to be someone who can still dream aloud. Phantasy realms and paranormal flights of fancy let the World-Soul stretch out and they console the Monad, piece by peace. By looking backward and forward {and sidelong} from our respective worlds for a moment — by pitching to the angels and inviting in the monsters — we may learn aspects of the eternal unfathomable: inner truths, sacred duties, redeeming faiths.
I believe the books are the only true way for me to chart my path, to lay down the tracks of my mental labyrinth and make good on the promises inside my heart and mind. I believe in the book as I believe in myself.
There is unassailable power in a book because nowhere else can you contain so convicted a piece of your soul for $9.99 or less and feel contented at the exchange and endeavor. ~ D
Thresholds of Transformation 