The Ruler of Fools

I started this blog to try to overcome a long dry spell in my writing. For months, I found it exceptionally difficult to write anything. I am working on two books, but for most of last year I was stalled. This was partly due to a change in medication at the beginning of the year, a change which made my emotional life more stable, but which also caused my writing to suffer. The mood stabilizer I am on has made me more subdued, more patient, less frenzied, and less talkative. My mind is not as hyperactive as it was, so I don’t find myself brimming with passionate words anymore.

But it was also the subject matter. I’m developing a book about despair to accompany my Despair Sanctuary event series. But I’ve found it is hard to write about despair when one is continually tempted to fall into it. Despair is not a good place to write from, because it is inherently negative. It is a collapse of the spirit, and therefore non-creative. I needed different subject matter to get my creative juices flowing again. That is why I started this blog, so I could write about whatever subject was coming to my mind. I wanted to exercise the muscle of writing and develop a consistent practice, even if what I wrote wasn’t publishable or relevant to the books I want to write.

So far, it’s been working. I overcame that dry spell and have been posting a new blog every week for 19 weeks now. It’s not my best work, but I feel like I’m getting the bad writing out of the way so that I can get to the good writing that I want to publish. But I also don’t know how sustainable it is. This post, for instance, is aimless and rambly, more diary entry than essay. But it’s all I can come up with this week. These days, whatever words I can string together counts as an accomplishment.

I don’t know how sustainable it is because there is just so much noise out there right now. Between the daily barrage of controversy from the White House, and the constant commentary, I feel like nothing I say has any significance or meaning or value. And what can one say but, “No!”, “Stop!”, “Opposite!”?

Now there lived in that city a man poor but wise, and he saved the city by his wisdom. But nobody remembered that poor man. So I said, “Wisdom is better than strength.” But the poor man’s wisdom is despised, and his words are not heeded.

The quiet words of the wise are more to be heeded than the shouts of a ruler of fools.

Wisdom is better than weapons of war, but one sinner destroys much good.

Ecclesiastes 9:15-18

I don’t want just to add to the noise. Nor do I want to be a distraction. I want my writing to embolden and inspire people, to awaken people to the truth that this world is created by humans, and humans can change it. I want my writing to serve the revolution, to make the Great General Strike more likely—that day when the workers of the world rise together and stop everything and say, “Here are our demands.” Nothing seems more worth writing about to me than that.

Will I ever see that day? Will anyone? If we never do, it would not just be a sad fact, it would be the single saddest fact. The people have the power to overrule the will of the few, to overrule the polluters and exploiters and oppressors and mass murderers. But instead of using it to liberate ourselves, we use it to hand them all the more power over us. So the nightmare continues.

But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe we do have it in us. And maybe by writing I can make it more likely. Is that hope? I don’t know. I’ve long since abandoned my fidelity to hope. Hope is what they sell you so you don’t act radically. Maybe despair is what we need, a total disbelief in the power of reform.

But the notion, that a radical break from the status quo is possible, that we may yet engineer “a world in which it is easier to be good,” that I still cherish. And I’ll die on that hill. Rulers of fools be damned.

Jack Holloway