I read a fic and an email today that both made me want to go destroy something beautiful.
I rarely have the sense that I get the right word in the right place. And to read the lines that the authors wrote was soul-crushing.
They were perfect lines, you see. They were the perfect line in the perfect place, so evocative that you knew exactly what the writer was talking about and you could feel it slotting into place in your own life.
Once I took a class on novels - Text and Culture in America, 1945-1985 - which meant that we read a lot of books like Raintree County, The Invisible Man, and Sometimes A Great Notion. And the teacher was insane. All my really good teachers have been insane.
These two lines today made me realise what he meant in one of his stories. He was driving on I-5 somewhere, when a Judy Collins song came on. The song had a line about waiting to meet you where the seagull stitch the sea to the sky.
He had to pull over and rage about that line. She had figured out what it is that seagulls do when they dart into the water, into the sky, into the water - and he hadn't.
This is what I mean by soul-destroying. The lines nailed it. Absolutely fucking nailed it.
"Tonight I'm a mutilated angel, using the cold concrete stairs to reach the sky, hunched over from the wounds where my wings used to be."*
Someday, I want to put the right word in the right place - and I want to watch someone else's soul be destroyed and rebuilt with the words I managed to command and the truth I managed to tell. You build a civilisation in that moment, that second of prose. The old civilisation falls; the new one rises and the new one is very different.
I am a mutilated angel. I can see the stars, but I'll never reach them.
*-- Warren Ellis
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