Brian Christopher will read from So Many Things That Want To Burn on Sunday, October 11 at 5 P.M. on the McMenamins Stage.

Writing should be extreme. It should absolve or condemn. It has the power to create or destroy, and it should not be passive. It should give birth or kill, or at least draw blood. But it has to be clandestine; its motives should be shrouded. You have to be made blind, like falling in love, to be deceived by such illusions. We all want, secretly, to be wounded in this way—a way we cannot buy ourselves into, but it’s difficult to cut your own wrists or run onto a blade. We have to be lulled, tricked. It’s hard to trust a writer who shows you the knife too soon. There should be a bribe for the eyes, a flash of something shiny as hint, then, suddenly, open flesh and scarlet spreading. The writer should decoy like a magician who waves his left hand ornately in the air—a magnet to vision—while his right slips the dove from his sleeve. We say we hate surprises, but we are desperate to be fooled. Afraid to be touched until a lover’s caress lures some kind of heaven along our spine. These conundrums suggest a kind of madness is at play.

But we are hardly helpless. Through language the world is made, laid to waste, and made again—rising from the ashes and the rubble, phoenix-like, to go again in search of fire—creating chaos from order before plunging back into the breach. It is the most powerful tool we hold.

Instinctively, we seek knowledge and experience, but we fear these things when face to face with the abyss of their transformation, the sheer darkness of their proclivity for change, their unknown foreboding. But the writer should force us to be brave by cornering us between a stone and the ledge before we have a chance to run, so that leaping is the only choice left. Only then do we  become strong enough to find the inherent courage to actively destroy and recreate ourselves, ready at any moment to lay our flesh against the razor or build a fortress on the faultline—craving scars, anxious for the fissure to open and threaten to swallow us whole.

Where is all this leading? It is academic; the gift is in the process, not the goal. Inevitably, to a place without laws or leaders, where the past falls away like molting skin and the future never forms, the moment only a flower unfolding in an endless cycle of decay and bloom, beautiful as the gasped-for breath stolen by a sucker-punch to the gut or the sudden loss of altitude as the plane descends. But, alas, I do not aspire to be Icarus here, waxing with feathered words to fashion wings with my eyes on the Sun. I know this definition, for all its acrobatics and arching, cannot escape the tower prison. It can only dream and die and settle for the ocean when it longs for the sky. Again, these words—these wines and weapons—are all I have. They may intoxicate, inspire, or incite to action, or they may fail to engage. But to me there are no alternatives; I am ready to fly or fall. Inertia is the only sin. I am at the edge, and all I can do is jump.

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