Holy Words

It is not even four in the morning. I have arisen from sleep to have bowl of cereal and work on the rough draft of a new novel, one that will not even see the light of my proofreading pen until sometime in the middle of the next year. As a writer for a very small press I am always wondering about where my writing goes, who should be reading it. I am convinced most modern writing now not only goes to the wrong places, but is written for the wrong people. As a writer who masquerades as a student and spends a fair amount of his time in academia I see that most of the writing, fictional and no fictional that sets itself up as serious is also bound to be incestuous. Professors of nothing writing to other professors, impressing each other with the strength of their weak words. Conferences as self-fulfilling and infertile as masturbation where men and women hammer together abstruse words into obtuse concepts.
What we need is alternate altars where to consecrate our words. What we need now are other sacred spaces to congregate and set down the words which change the world.
This week the High Holidays came to an end. The last day, Simhat Torah, was when the Torah is completed and then begun all over again, when the Torah is danced around the house and we reflect on the holy and magic power of the written word, and the word received. I put on the house altar, not only the Torah, but my own novels as well as books of mythology that had changed me, reading their ends and thier beginnings and processing them about the room. All of our lives are guided by holy words. All of our words should be Torah.