How the Mighty Pen Will Fall

In West Africa, "traditional" West Africa, to write something down is to kill it. As soon as the story is parted from the human mind, the human heart, the human voice, the story has died. People who can afford it hire a family story teller to keep track of the family and to keep them alive in hearts to come.

In Western contemporary culture, writing is tantamount to immortalizing oneself. Oral history is seen as unreliable, silly even. But written history - don't we see? - is stagnant. It does not keep up with the flow of the river. Writing is a pool all its own, becoming more and more removed from the water that flows. Eventually, the collected debris builds up in the little eddy. And sediment collects to form a thin shaft of land. And the story persists forever in its pool. But fewer and fewer people come to visit.

It is only a matter of centuries before one must study for years to even get at the most elementary meaning of the landlocked text. It gets further inland, further from the flow. But it is immortal. But it is alone.

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Stanley Hauerwas calls ours a culture of death.

We laugh at cultures less ornately technological.
They have witch doctors and poor health.
They have missing eyes, or limbs!
They have a strange growth that the "witch doctor" cannot cure,
It must have come from an angry neighbor,
Never considering food allergies.

We must visit a "real doctor," and have a battery of tests completed.
"Of course a smile will not cure what you have!
Not a hug, nor the air--
This is exceedingly rare!"

Somehow or other, hopefully by regular visits to the prophet doctor
and worshiping at the hospital shrine, we may satisfy death while living,
and never face it head on.

We write a moment so it will go on living forever.
We take a picture so the moment will have the posterity that we do not.
And only the camera's eye will know the moment.
What a shame! that the camera has not our heart!

What a shame the god science has not found a way to transplant a human heart
into a camera, so that the pain and joy - the beautiful transience of the human condition -
will be
perfectly preserved,
forever.