I find the concept of emotion particularly intriguing when mere words have the power to inspire an audience. I have written a speech dealing with a topic I am passionate about – literature. It is entitled Kill Your Darlings, and I intended it to be an unstructured and blotchy piece of work, purposed to imbue the listeners with an emotional response towards two polar forms of literature.
“To find your own voice, forget about it being heard. Become a saint of your own province and your own consciousness.” Allen Ginsberg said that. I think he meant that writers should maintain the standards, stick to structure, worry about rhyme, meter, and syntax; but only if they wish never to write beautifully and truthfully. A writer, a true writer, does not seek the approval of other men. The other men being those staunch geniuses, who retreat into clouds of cigar smoke, congratulating each other on degrees that give them authority determine the proper use of commas and apostrophes. Play by their rules and your writing will be prohibited. No run on sentences, no stacking of adjectives, and no fervor.
So let’s toast to illiteracy. Only the illiterate understand the true nature of life; their noses are not glued into the empty pages of scholarly books, but their eyes see and their hearts feel what most authors only write about, never actually experiencing. They understand what it’s like to live day to day with nothing. They understand the cruelty of the world. They understand the way people will let you down.
That’s what writing is about. Write of truth. What would literature be like if we only wrote the truth? No illustrious fluff, no sentence structure. Write what you are thinking. Write exactly what’s circulating through your mind this very instant. First thought best thought. Unfortunately, self-consciousness has become too large a burden. We all care too much about how our writing will be viewed; we are forced to think that way.
So let’s have our students keep idly staring at computer screens, “writing their theme” but actually speculating about their performance in last night’s game. Let’s keep up the collective groan that rises in the classroom every time the lit teacher announces an upcoming theme. Let’s continue training our students to absolutely dread any assignment that has to do with writing. Or let’s look at writing for what it truly is – a gift from God. Humans have the incomparable ability to tie letters and words together in infinite combinations.
Try pulverizing a student until the contents of his body flood into the space of his head, and see if anything good and creative comes out of that. How do we expect kids to find their own voice if they’re being forced to worry about the meticulous details and structure of their writing? It’s not a pleasurable thing, as it should be. Rather, it’s a task that stigmatizes creativity.
Take the Beat Generation of the 1950’s as an example. Artists like Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs sat in countless university literature classes, wondering how these highly educated professors refused to tolerate “slack” writing styles. According to these tradition-based teachers, literature was not the place to express the inextinguishable flame of the scandalous and risqué business of the secular world around us. For them, professional writers should create literature only according to age-old rules of structure.
But all of that changed when Lucien Carr and his close friends opened their eyes to the oppressive and unwelcomed force of the typical “writer” of their age. These “writers” clung too ferociously to the accepted standards, and neglected to appreciate the affects of World War II, the degenerative human condition, the use of drugs, alternate sexuality, and the appeal of religion to the human psyche. When writers like Allen Ginsberg realized that these modern and sometimes profane occurrences could be manipulated into beautiful poems and pieces of literature, an innovative new writing style was born. Of course, this movement paralleled the cultural phenomena of the 1960’s; yet it still introduced the idea that the truth of life, no matter how messy and disgraceful, was always welcomed in literature.
Writing is a common ground – a way for people to relate to each other through similar experiences and feelings. A poem without rhyme, a page without periods, a thought without filter may reflect the unstructured, incessant, and remorseless pain that inflicts itself upon the life of so many readers. And sometimes beauty is not expressed simply, but requires the use of multiple and unique adjectives that, outside of post-WWII literature, would be considered poor writing.
Wake, melancholy lover, wake and weep for the misunderstanding of writing. The years have distorted the most appropriate purpose of literature – the true, unrestricted manifestation of the self. Ambition for beauty will help us seek truth and sincerity in writing. Turn your eyes towards the splendor of words and reject the encumbrance of structure, rules, and standards.
Blossoming Psychology 