The Debacle of the Modern Writer

by Brant Watson

When it comes to writing, superficially it seems easy. Unfortunately when you sit down to write something you come face to face with the difficult problem of needing a topic and also the sense that if you’re going to say something that it might as well be WORTH saying something.

Current events at first glance appear especially ripe for commentary. The trouble is that this election cycle has been so weird that it’s difficult to satirize. Things that would have seemed totally satirical in previous elections seem to rain down upon us without even a trace of irony. Couple that with a well established and highly skilled field of satirists this seems like a recipe for disaster. It’s often more advantageous to fill a niche.

So what does that leave? Fiction? Is there something to add to the body of work produced over the course of human history? Philosophy? Could one go beyond the Critique of Pure Reason, Leviathan, or A Treatise of Human Nature? Could one make it more approachable than Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance? I think that’s the real trouble. I don’t know if that’s candor or pessimism, but it’s quite easy to glance through all of these and find that in the end people are and have been wrestling without much success with some of the same questions for eons. It’s manifest in art and culture across the world.

So here we sit, pondering our place in the universe. Is an anthropocentric perspective purely a conceit? What is existence? What lies at the boundary between something and nothing? What matters and does it matter that it matters? How can we experience meaning when we know of our own temporary nature? What’s the point of building something when everything we make is impermanent? Is there any such thing as meaning or is meaning itself is a human construction existing solely in the fleshy network between our ears?

It’s necessary then to ponder the totality of human experience, coalesced as cultural values and try our best to puzzle out the paradox of “why?”. In turning our minds eye across the expanse of time, an infinite joke just beyond our reach begins to manifest itself as something tangible, almost within our reach. But then we snap out of it, look around and wonder: “Clinton. Trump. Why the fuck are THESE my only choices?!!!”