A Deepening Divide

There is a deepening divide between how much expertise or knowledge I believe I should have before I express a thought, and how much of these elements I actually have, no matter how fast the latter pool grows, the former expands with exponential growth. Replace knowledge with skill and eloquence at the written or spoken word, and the problem is the same. Nobody knows more fully than I just how inadequate my words and thoughts are to express the realities of the knowable universe as known by [this] man, and how halting and humbling and horrible my attempts at literary inscription truly are. I can never know if even the best writer-of-words was understood how they intended, but I doubt they ever were. However, even if I could, in my humble mind, identify the skill of the master more so than that of the charlatan,(being myself a charlatan, it may be an act of hubris for me to even try) then what is the point of creating art when you know there is nothing grand to contribute? When you know you can only paint by numbers in the end?

Perhaps there is some nugget of perspective within the words I cannot bring myself to write, and the stories I don’t trust myself to tell, that no one else can or will expose without a feeble attempt from my feeble mind at expression in the first case. Perhaps there is value in my words, and in the choice of them, and in the very choice to use them. Perhaps I am not just a rambling mind amongst the billions of others, inflating my own self perception and intellect, even as I deride it myself from within, and maybe instead I am a bright and capable mind, worthy of being expressed and understood.

Sadly, the cacophony disarms us all. When the whole crowd is shouting to be heard over the noise, the crowd becomes noise, and the noise even louder. Even were I to express some erudite idea, tell an interesting story, provide a valuable perspective to the international telecommunications ether, or what have you; I cannot hope to be heard.

Create for creation's sake? That seems seemly for the sculptor, the painter, and the musician, as these creations require no engrossed observer to exist; For the thinker, what hope can there be of fulfillment when all words are inadequate, nothing is knowable, and the only audience one truly has for their thought is an internal echo chamber. Philosophy is madness until millions read and interpret and understand in their own way. What point is there in hoping to have that span and scope, especially when I, the madman poet, do not trust in the validity of my own work enough to share it fearlessly with friends and family, let alone to become the shameless self promoter one must become in this age of internet rage in order to succeed as a “thought leader” or “influencer”?

There is no point in writing this kind of nonsense, and yet I cannot stop. Yet I still write, and ramble, and spend all of my time in deep painful thought, just to no end instead of to even an imaginary one. Even I am unlikely to read anything I have written even once. I am no profound mind. I am no prophet or teacher. I am nothing. 

So, If all of this creation I do means nothing, and it will wisp away into the vacuum of the digital cloud when all of my accounts time-out, long after I am dead and gone. . . Why can’t I stop doing this to myself?