On Purpose

Not long ago, my good friend Trey and I were conversing via Skype (him being in Texas), two lonely souls talking at a box and pounding at its keys. A good number - 50+ - of his poems were floating around on the internet. The actual quality of them is neither here nor there, but he was ashamed of them, and it baffled me, because most were written in high school, and to me it was, at the very least, a quantitative achievement, if not qualitative. In a now-clear-to-me cruel joke I dug them up and had a bit of fun. For me, it was the excavation of something lost - irregardless of what it actually was, it was now found. For him, in his sly self-loathing ways, it was rather like the exposure of ghosts long since past, and preferably forgotten. So, he removed them from the internet, and virtually, from existence. Fair enough.

Recently I brought this back up - I was curious why he would ever be ashamed of something like that, even if just for a level solely derived of passion and, at the time, self-pleasure. Perhaps I was, or am, a little envious that he had something to his name. It's still a mystery to me. He explained that he has become very wary of leaving anything behind, in the written record, with his name attached to it; he is concerned about legacy. Fair enough.

But he is he, and I am me; or more simply, he is, and I am. My basic conceit - if I ever uttered anything of value - is that even Achilles will one day be forgotten. Achilles, who traded a happy, inessential life for glory, for legacy. If ever a figure actually existed, it worked: in the annals of the written human record continuous with the present, Achilles, mythical or real, is remembered. But there will come a day when he will be forgotten; or perhaps not forgotten, but his legend, his legacy, will simply cease to exist. Count on it.

Beware, the signs in the back alley of my mind read, beware those who would advise to 'live everyday like it could be your last.' This is not that.

What I discovered in my endless probing was that I am not concerned about legacy. I am simply looking to create, and claim something as my own. Not in a decidedly voluminous manner, though - quality is also a concern. But quality must, by neccessity, come second to the act of creation itself. 

When I am working on screenplays, I keep in mind that it is intended to be sold. For any movie I ever write, fates willing, to be -mine-, it must actually get made. Alone, a screenplay is, by its very nature, incomplete. I cannot allow myself to masturbate* 120 pages script and be done; it must get made.

Prose doesn't have the same 'limitation' (some might call it a control, or boundary). Though it may not be my intention to do so with anything in particular I write, I could self-publish it and it would be thus: my own. Regardless of legacy, I seek something to call my own. 

*I hereby claim masturbate to be a transitive verb, the direct object of which thusly being: the result of the act of self-pleasure, be it in a sexual, creative, emotional, or moral capacity.