The Writer's Words

Words.

Words are the writer's friends and the writer's enemies. They make me feel safe and secure, happy and satisfied, and they hold me prisoner until I've written them all down. The writer bending over a piece of paper or the keyboard of a computer is bending under the cutting whip of the cruelest slave master since Rameses II. And the reward is only fleeting, but the reward is heaven. The only satisfaction intrinsic in discovering the perfect word is a satisfaction that lasts for half the time it takes for a pondering to become a realization. It's an elusive millisecond, a non-existent fraction. It can't be measured, it can only be felt. It can't register on a scientific instrument, but it can addict a person so hard that they become a writer for life.

Words.

I can't write them all down. How many words are there in the world? There are more than I can learn. If I want to get anything done, I have to ignore the irritant of the factual knowledge that I'll never even finish skimming the cream off the top of the potential of all the words to know, to say, to read -all the words to write. In the haze of just writing, facts settle into the background and sit there like berry-colored lumps of juicy luminosity shining through a thick fog. They're real, but I don't look at them. I feel them, and if I let myself feel too much of them, it burns. But mostly I blissfully ignore them and just write. I don't want to know how much I don't know, I just want to devour as much knowledge as I can as fast as I can.

Words.

Words can make me wealthy. Words can make me famous. I can be a Homer or a Shakespeare or a Charles Dickens or a J.K. Rowling. The words I write can make people feel things. They can make people laugh. If they're very good words, they can make people cry. The words are tools, they're just a means to an end. Or so I keep telling myself. Somehow, I keep forgetting that the words are supposed to be working for me, and I start serving the words, worshiping at the altar of the words, doing whatever I can for the words, searching for days on end like a lost child hopelessly seeking a glimpse of a familiar face, looking for the right words, all in the hope that I'll get a smile or a pat on the head from those wonderful, wonderful words. I love them, I'd die for them, and they're just spiky black figures on a stark white page.

Words.

Damn.

Who am I? I'm a writer.

Will my words last forever? Will they be forgotten after today? Will they be rediscovered in the far future? Will they have any influence? Will anyone even read them at all?

Who am I? I'm nobody. But feel free to quote me anyway.

The Alpha and the Omega

Comprehensive is a comforting word. It feels like a promise; it feels like perfection. If you pick up a book with the word "comprehensive" in the title, you feel guaranteed that whatever you need to know about the subject of the book will be in there. And you sigh as you realize all you have to do now is find it.

A popular slangy way to say "comprehensive" is "A to Z". If a book or website or person claims to have or know such-and-such "A to Z!" (the exclamation point seems to be a mandatory part of the phrase) it is claiming that nothing has been left out and no stone has been left unturned - indeed, not even one letter of the alphabet has been left in peace during the creator's exhaustive search for and organization of information on the topic of interest.

As tacky and commercial as the term "A to Z" seems compared to a solid, Latin-derived word like "comprehensive," it is more expressively visceral. It reaches more people at a level easily understood since their childhood. Just as Jesus Christ is our justification and sanctification, so does expressiveness justify and sanctify grammatically improper terms. The Bible, translated into language even a child could understand (for good reason; see Luke 18:16, Matthew 19:14 and Matthew 18:3) has always been a book of the people and the people's language.

It is not surprising then that in the last book of the Bible we find that familiar comforting guarantee, as contemporary and apropos of the moment as A to Z filing systems, that God is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. It is a simple statement of truth in simple terms anyone can understand. It speaks to the common sense in humanity which is so unpretentious that language with its rules shuns it as too common. Yet the Bible does not deal with pretentious rules, airs and propriety. God speaks to people, not ideas. His words to us tell us who He is, and in no uncertain terms.

"I am the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last." I am everything! God is saying. I am all you will ever need. Not only am I all you will ever need, I am all you are able to need. Everything leads back to Me. Without Me there is nothing, not even a void-of-space nothing, because that's a definable concept and therefore is something. Nothing.

God is everything. He was here before us and he will be here after us. The buck stops here, right back where it started. There is no escaping God. He's comprehensive. Nothing is left out; nothing is left undone. Here is God's guarantee: whatever you are looking for, it is in Him. All you have to do now is find it, so start looking.

And... feel free to quote me!