"the writers prayer" 

i wrote as a letter to the readers of new wave writing. it is not a piece. i mean it to be an encouragement for you to continue writing.

"the writers prayer"

to sit down and write something brilliant is something i often intend to do. and, just as often i am disappointed or unsatisfied with the result. this leads me to wonder if the masters of this craft spin their ideas with precision and art, while affecting an air of carelessness, much like a spider would. if so, do i need to pretend or convince myself that i don't care how the piece turns out in order to produce a work i can live with?

the life of a writer is a strange one, i think. few of us make our living solely off our craft. we are teachers and garbage men, bankers and window-washers, and we go home to write in a closet somewhere, hidden from the very world we seek to express. often i try to escape my calling. i spend foolish money on brainless movies hoping i might evade whatever it is in me that makes me write. however, all these big budget, low brow productions do is ensure my swift return to familiar ground: writing feels like time well spent. with that said, i know i have to write, but what?

maybe i should start a writer's peer support group, " hello my name is joshua? and i'm a writer...." this would serve as the spade as i dig myself into the grave of an empty life. for to a writer, life without writing is death. we all need a platform to shout from, and we all have a craving, not just for fame, but for remembrance after our demise.

secretly, all writers (this includes novelists: the brand of author we consider sold out, mostly because they're more successful) believe they're the cream of the crop, the next shakespeare if you will. i found this out as i was expressing this most intimate thought to another writer, only to have her finish my sentences. while this is discouraging at first, i would like us all to draw strength from it. writers change the world. our passion has a purpose. words we write will communicate our thoughts across the centuries, even if it is in quiet family moments and not in textbooks throughout the nations.

this is why i write. yes, i would like to be famous, (being rich wouldn't hurt either), but it is for the ones i love, that they might know me more completely in the end. and so i voice why i write; if my works are worth millions, or only a dime, i wish them to be priceless to someone somewhere, sometime.

"death in the open"

lewis thomas

most of the dead animals you see on highways near the cities are dogs, a few are cats. out in the countryside, the forms and coloring of the dead are strange; these are the wild creatures. seen from a car window they appear as fragments, evoking memories of woodchucks, badgers, skunks, voles, snakes, and sometimes the mysterious wreckage of a deer.

it is always a queer shock, part a sudden upwelling of grief, part unaccountable amazement. it is simply astounding to see an animal dead on a highway. the outrage is more than just the location; it is the impropriety of such visible death, anywhere. you do not expect to see dead animals in the open. it is the nature of animals to die alone, off somewhere, hidden. it is wrong to see them lying out on the highway; it is wrong to see them anywhere.

everything in the world dies, but we only know about it as a kind of abstraction. if you stand in a meadow, at the edge of a hillside, and look around carefully, almost everything you see is in the process of dying, and most things will be dead long before you are. if it were not for the constant renewal and replacement going on before your eyes, the whole place would turn to sand and stone under your feet.

there are some creatures that do not seem to die at all; they simply vanish into their own progeny. single cells do this. the cell becomes two, then four, and so on, and after a while the last trace is gone. it cannot be seed as death; barring mutation, the descendants are simply the first cell, living all over again. the cycles of the slime mold have episodes that seem as conclusive as death, but the withered slug, with it's stalk and fruiting body, is plainly the transient tissue of a developing animal; the free-swimming amebocytes use this organ collectively to produce more of themselves.

there are said to be a billion billion insects on the earth at any moment, most of them with very short life expectancies by our standards. someone has estimated that there are 25 million assorted insects hanging in the air over every temperate square mile, in a column extending upward for thousands of feet, drifting through the layers of the atmosphere like plankton. they are dying steadily, some by being eaten, some dropping in their tracks, tons of them around the earth, disintegrating as they die, invisibly.

who ever sees dead birds, in anything like the huge numbers stipulated by the certainty of the death of all birds? a dead bird is an incongruity, more startling than an unexpected live bird, sure evidence to the human mind that something has gone wrong. birds do their dying off somewhere, behind things, under things, never on the wing.

animals seem to have an instinct for performing death alone, hidden. even the largest, most conspicuous ones find ways to conceal themselves with time. if an elephant missteps and dies in an open place, the herd will not leave him there; the others will pick him up and carry the body from place to place, finally putting it down in some inexplicably suitable location. when elephants encounter the skeleton of an elephant out in the open, they methodically take up each of the bones and distribute them, in a ponderous ceremony, over neighboring acres.

it is a natural marvel. all of life of the earth dies, all of the time, in the same volume as the new life that dazzles us each morning, each spring. all we see of this is the odd stump, the fly struggling on the porch floor of the summer house in october, the fragment on the highway. i have lived all of my life with an embarrassment of squirrels in my backyard, they are all over the place, all year long, and i have never seen anywhere, a dead squirrel.

i suppose it is just as well. if the earth were otherwise, and all the dying were done in the open, with the dead there to be looked at, we would never have it out of our minds. we can forget about it much of the time, or think of it as an accident to be avoided, somehow. but it does make the process of dying more exceptional than it really is, and harder to engage in at the times when we ourselves must engage.

in our way, we conform as best we can to the rest of nature. the obituary pages tell us of the news that we are dying away, while the birth announcements, in finer print, off at the side of the page, inform us of our replacements, but we get no grasp from this of the enormity of the scale. there are 3 billion of us on the earth, and all 3 billion must be dead, on a schedule, with this lifetime. the vast mortality, involving something over 50 million of us each year, takes place in relative secrecy. we can only really know of the deaths in our households, or among our friends. these, detached in our minds from all the rest, we take to be unnatural events, anomalies, outrages. we speak of our own dead in low voices; struck down, we say, as though visible death can only occur for cause, by disease or violence, avoidably. we send off for flowers, grieve, make ceremonies, scatter bones, unaware of the rest of the 3 billion on the same schedule. all of that immense mass of flesh and bone and consciousness will disappear by absorption into the earth, without recognition by the transient survivors.

less than half a century from now, our replacements will have more than doubled the numbers. it is hard to see how we can continue to keep this secret, with such multitudes doing the dying. we will have to give up the notion that death is a catastrophe, or detestable, or avoidable, or even strange. we will need to learn more about the cycling of life in the rest of the system, and about our connection to the process. everything that comes alive seems to be in trade for something that dies, cell for cell. there might be some comfort in the recognition of synchrony, in the information that we all go down together, in the best of company.