The resurrection of the author

I've been to the tomb & the body wasn't there. I saw the manifestos they tried to wrap her in folded neatly & stacked in piles. We have long been told that the author is dead. Didn't a crowd see him hanging there? Her body in the torchlight of the mob swinging from the limb of the tree. Didn't Joseph take him down and lay her in his very own tomb? The tomb they hermetically sealed so no one could get at him.

"He is finished," the mob cried, "we are free from her tyranny."

They reinterpreted the texts. Nothing was sacred. The swine had the pearls & they trampled them to see what they were made of. Teachers were running amok. Freud got in on the action too.

"It's all about sex with their mother," they cried. "She has an electra complex."

"It's not just a cigar."

Things were getting out of control. Literary criticism sprang up like weeds after a summer rain. They were drunk on possibility & power. Genius was within their grasp, all they had to do was take it. Nothing was sacred.

In the beginning it seemed like such a good idea. As egalitarian as pure democracy. The book is what you make/take from it. It was literary communism.

Somewhere along the way they lost the plot.

The thing is you can't learn if you're not listening. They trapped themselves in the cages of their own minds. It's ok if you think that but I think something different. Let's not fight about it. Let's agree to disagree. You're alright & I'm alright, can't we just get along?

But they weren't alright. I'm not alright & you're not alright. Shouldn't we do something about it. Let's fight it out, let's hug it out. Let's move from ourselves and occupy the minds of others. get into the mind of the author. See how it feels in there. Get comfortable, get uncomfortable. Tell the author where it hurts. Maybe she's wrong, maybe you should slap some sense into him. But you can't talk with a dead man.

You can't talk without entering into the ring and preparing to be mocked and hated. Not if it's worth a damn. Get in there raise hell. Show them what you can do. & if you come out beaten and bloody find out where you were wrong.

Are you ready to wrestle with her? Oil up for some greco-roman wrestling with socrates. Sharpen your épée for a bout with Baudelaire. Ready yourself in the (not so)martial arts. Be ready to defend your personae against malicious attacks. In short make yourself once again into the fit youngster you once were and make war with that vicious world cause if you're not ready to defend yourself and take offence against those that do wrong then you and all those around you will become stale and boring and will slowly become the straw men.

Go.