Writing in the Age of Insanity

I flipped on the news early Monday morning, and there was a linguist analyzing what had emerged from Trump’s mouth at a rally. The newscaster, Joy Reid, was earnest as she read a series of words that made no sense. Like a jazz singer scatting, Trump had tossed up a word salad of epic proportions.

“He says he has the best words…. but he seems to be using all the words, regardless of whether they make sense or not,” she said. The woman is a writer so she was experiencing the same thing I was—pain. She repeated various sections of his speech, searching for the secret message underlying the words. Was there any? The linguist, John McWhorter, broke it down for her. “When you’re processing language, the first thing that comes into your brain is the tone, the music, then the content.” Like animals in a forest, the strange noises emerging from Trump’s mouth carried an emotional code, though the string of nonsense was utterly lacking in any coherent meaning.

For a writer, this can be crazy making. Sure, we deal in the musicality of language, but writers spend an inordinate amount of time turning a sentence the way a pool shark throws english on a cue ball. We write, we rewrite, we fine tune. We wonder if we’ve really captured that emotion with authenticity or an image with clarity. Are writers a little OCD? Maybe. Are we a little twisted, mining our own subconscious for 1. amusement and 2. therapy? Yes, definitely.

But there is something else. A good writer can infuse the most trivial things with depth and meaning. Whether it’s Proust, meticulously observing his social milleu or the writers of Seinfeld, squeezing the hilarity out of self absorbtion and neurosis, a good writer can transmute the mundane into art. Writing is a way of finding the beauty in things, of understanding evil, seeing irony, releasing joy, making people laugh and meditating on the meaning of the universe.

And here we are, writing in the Age of Insanity. The TV is whack. People are rioting in the streets. Kids are disappearing into a maze of bureaucracy. A giant baby Trump blimp is flying over the Houses of Parliment. Russian spies are dropping dead. There is a big tent circus of madness being performed daily.

Maybe you’re starting to feel a sense of existential angst. All those hours of deep thinking, the books that you read, the technique you studied, the discipline exerted to write consistently, was all that a pointless exercise? Have we arrived at a dark age where words mean nothing? Sort of like that Twilight Zone episode where the survivor of armageddon finally has time to read, and breaks his glasses.

The answer is no. Fine writing is the tongue of angels. It is an artform worth aspiring to master. You’re a witness and your mind is an instrument. Whether you choose to speak out about injustice, or to record the pathos of the human condition, you need to keep the words alive and imbue them with meaning.

So keep writing in the Age of Insanity, despite the clown show in the center ring.