GREAT LITERATURE
can exalt us, exhume us from the graves of a horribly cruel and unforgiving world, slough off our putrid cocoons of skin and money and now and pressure and anxiety and hurry up and close your eyes this will all be over soon, and lift up our souls to new conceptions of gods and put colors and feelings and sounds on our lips that have no other name but sublime…
GREAT LITERATURE
can upend us, baseball-bat us upside the head, knock us into a ditch it made us dig, bury us in our own filth, and continue pouring abuse on us until we scream then screech then squeal then squeak in surrendering entreaties, begging, why are you doing this to me, what did I ever do to you, I was so happy and comfy in my chair please oh god stop, and then right at the point we can’t take the humiliation anymore some microscopically small piece of heaven erupts out of the mud like an orgasm and we weep with excruciating joy…
GREAT LITERATURE
can confuse us, wonder us, wander us, beat us into temptation and turn all the lights out while whispering tantalizations into the base of our spinal cords, showing us in the dark where all our sinister longings lie, the evil things we take pleasure in, the laughter that bubbles up as our enemies and maybe even our friends get theirs at our hands, and we know we’re fallen, nevermore to grace the light, but we learn, we learn so that we don’t have to do, and it’s enough to leave it there, and we slink back into the day a little wiser than before with a secret only we need to know…
GREAT LITERATURE
can shame us with tongue lashings of perfections, judging and cajoling us and showing us every bit every dot of what we’ve done wrong and how we could have done right, of all the times we slept when who we loved cried alone in the dark, and it teaches us how nail holes in doors can never be erased and how whatever sins we sinned can never be un-sinned and can never be made right, and all we can hope for is just one sliver of a chance to do something a quantum-bit better than the last time…
GREAT LITERATURE
can abjure us and clothe us with unbidden praise, groveling before us in our light and beneficence, how we’ve made the universe better than it was when it was just a kidney stone in god’s urethra, how fearsomely and wonderfully made we are and how no one and nothing else in the universe could ever hope to be worthy of licking the boot laces we threw in the trash…
GREAT LITERATURE
can comfort us in the lonely times, can anger us at our mother’s funeral, can make us laugh when the doctor shakes his head in sorrow with bad news, can lull us to sleep in the middle of the best party, can wake us up in the deepest darkest absence of life and sound, cats sleeping at our feet and lions sneaking into the bedroom to eat us and unicorns crashing through the window to take us to never land…
GREAT LITERATURE
finds us at our weakest and with one word can pierce us until we weep and cry harder than we’ve ever done before, a single snapshot picture that destroys everything we thought we are and in that moment we join the universe as a single atom, a drop in an ocean shared between stars and we become the whole world at once, showing us the difference between waiting for someone to save us and waiting for rigor mortis to set in…
GREAT LITERATURE
never does only one thing.
ArcherVox 