After Rushdie

After Rushdie | January 28, 2012

Will they come? Even as the cursor blinks before a trail of dangerous thought? As the ink dries in its case, its death assured by their chants? It never escaped its case; its destiny was forced in their hands, but will they come? Are my thoughts dangerous to their public order, damning to their sense of social use and ugly beauty and instrumental ambition? Am I socially useful? Do these words serve a purpose? Where are they?

The content in my mind, scurrilous and corrosive to the bodies of characters it wants to pour itself on, remains on the boil, but will they come for me? There is no place to preserve this self, for the keepers of religion and judges of justice and men of polity conspire in throttling their grip on me, but when will they come to my corner of this dangerous world? For some, their bleeding hearts burn in pain and disgust, the memory of mortal gods crushed by the writer and conjurer of myths in their midst, and did they not come for him, armed with hate and bloodlust and smouldering texts? Will that bloodstorm rise again? When the world shrinks by outsourcing edicts of death and noise everywhere, then where does the writer go?

Freedom exists, and I seek to pay no taxes to these modern Caesars, but will they come? Burning words and banning entries and erecting firewalls and banishing rights that make us the living, from these I hide in the closet of my own mind, but will they come there too? This ultimate fantasy of these cultural fanatics and puritans of an extreme taste, I can see somewhere these hovering shadows: ministers of the public and ministers of our spirits, (ex) judges of the law and judges of taste, but will they come closer, dousing my doubting thoughts with their easy certainties of mortification, their accusation of imported cant and superficiality legitimised on the banks of the Thames, their confirmed burdens of hurt? Will they come and devastate me? Will they extinguish language?

Will imagination be servile? Must creativity be sterile? When allusion eludes them, must they not take recourse to terror? Will they come? Aye, they will, and let them. I shall be here, with words burning in the cauldron of my mind, words with the strength to unmask. Words: they are all that I have.