What Is Literature?

“What,” said he, as he sagged heavily

back in his chair by the saloon window, “was

literature, is more to the point. Aren’t you

glad I’m here to tell you? Alas for us both—

for I must speak and you, belonging

to the eternal internet generation,

only care to bask in your

hyperlinked ‘comments’ and exchange of

simpering selfies on Instagram. We were

made for each other, as the saying goes.

Maybe it was all rigged,

yet in all its fantasy, it never lied.”

He sighed, raised his glass,

silently toasted the silent room,

took a sip of Wild Turkey, and shrugged.

“In the worlds of matter, energy, chaos,

the permanent slaughterhouse of the marketplace,

the ineluctable, inescapable

Darwinian struggle for what no living

thing in the end can actually achieve—

survival, that mirage in a world of perpetual transformation—

literature was defiance

of that lame squat, mortality,

soul’s defense in the soulless world—

a puff of smoke blown in the face of reality.

Yes, of course, the game was rigged,

but in all its fantasy, it never lied.”

He sighed, raised his glass,

took a sip of Wild Turkey, and shrugged.

“Writer, reader met on a page

in a corner, away from other eyes,

and built between them fantasies

of a world made for humankind

because made by the human,

enough like the inhuman world

to make them believe it, make them believe

that they might live in it.

There’s no escape if the jig is up,

but in all its fantasy, it never lied.”

He sighed, raised his glass,

took a sip of Wild Turkey, and shrugged.

“It seized and carried them off

into the verbal sky

in ventures of forever,

snagged on love and desire,

crushed between wisdom and power;

terrified them with the grandeur

of man when he wrecks his span,

tickled them till they were mad,

laughed till they choked and wept again,

threw them down till they slept, in twain

shot their hearts across the courts of the moon,

then threw them past the blackness of the stars.

It gave them paradise and hell,

empires of greed built on love’s cold ash

in Paris, London and New York,

the deserts of Bardo and San Francisco,

the place where angels and devils meet,

Las Vegas and Shanghai’s shadowless streets.

Whatever could be said it said

in words’ infernal heaven,

the cloud-capped victories of language

even if only in a bucket of dust

in a cellar of rusty swords,

a child’s game between naps and meals and potty training,

an old man dreaming of what could never have been,

an escape for an hour from reality’s prison,

a glimpse from our cell
across the loam

of a world that might have been but was not our home.

And now we have the internet

instead.

The jig is rigged. Oh, if only

in all its fantasy, it never lied!”

He sighed, raised his glass,

silently toasted the silent room,

took a sip of Wild Turkey, and shrugged.