Purpose

       I've been writing fragments lately. Nothing profound; mere literary tidbits jotted down as they surge. Haikus, paragraphs, instant messaging musings. The topics are varied; voice and style, delightfully inconstant. Said drabbles coincide only in being unprofound; quintessentially inane and of no remarkable consequence.

       But shuffling across and thinking through my recent grammatical smorgasbord, I've accumulated the speculation that perhaps all literature—even the distinguished specimens: The Iliad, Don Quixote, The Hobbit—may simply be sources of intellectual snacking for the quicker of wit. The delicate process of composition, storytelling, characterization, may be the mere by-product of the real mystery. An aesthetic side effect of imaginative lying. The actual beauty of it might lie submerged, its art composed by its mechanisms.

       A controlled secretion of ink onto paper. A sex of unadulterated materials becoming irreversibly permeated; contaminated; conjoined;embraced by each other. A delicate emanation of viscous liquid into fibrous weave, irrevocably absorbed; merged to stain in sequential squiggles hopefully close enough to several dozen preestablished shapes that they might fabricate sense. Or, when we get really lucky, sentences.

       Maybe it is not the writing, but the fact we are writing, where the profundity dwells. Maybe this exercise of pen and paper, of controlled euphoria, is the true essence of it; perhaps the what of our scriptures is irrelevant.

       Mayhap, just perhaps, the only value of writing is lying within the undeniable fact that we must, and we do.