In 2001, author Ken Kesey died, and I went to a tribute event at the Park Branch Library in the Haight Ashbury in San Francisco. The event was both intimate and celebrity rich, with Ken Babbs and Mountain Girl reminiscing and reading from Kesey's unpublished writings and posthumous releases.
Sometime during the program, a quote was shared – repeated multiple times. I don't know if it was a direct quote from Kesey himself or if the person saying this was describing their own interpretation of Kesey's philosophy of writing.
"I know something good. I'll give it to you for free. You'll have it for the rest of your life."
I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, and that quote echoes in my head when I scroll through dozens of posts from ghostwriters promising to help people write books to make passive income, leave a legacy, build a brand, and so on.
There's a place for those agendas, of course. But this is the very least writing can do. The powers of writing aren't just for "leaders" looking to burnish a resume or reputation.
There's a much more exciting challenge for a writer to take up, and it's not necessary to be a "leader" to do it.
We each look out at life as if through a cracked piece of glass splattered with mud. The view out is different for each of us, with points of clarity and points of distortion and obstruction. On top of that, we are all hypnotized: Our culture, our parents, and our society hand us a neat mythology about the nature of the world on the other side of the glass.
What writers can do is use the process of wrangling language to perceive the world as clearly as possible and report those perceptions with fidelity, going toe to toe with the myths. Writers can exert efforts and develop methods for scraping away the mud in their own field of vision. They can call out the mud when they recognize it as such, and that is effectively a call to question the incantations of authority figures.
This is a path of liberation for writers and their readers.
"I know something good. I'll give it to you for free. You'll have it for the rest of your life."
The cracked glass spattered with mud reminds me of a family story.
When my mother-in-law and father-in-law were in their early dating days, they were riding in his car.
He pointed up in the direction of the windshield.
“Look at that!” he declared, pointing to a lovely bird of prey, probably a hawk.
“It’s just a small crack!” reassured MIL, thinking he was pointing to the actual windshield.