Let me cut you with it. Paper-thin, through the skin. It’d be a sharp incision. Hardly felt, barely seen, won’t leave a trail of evidence. At best, you’d get a beaded necklace, easily washed off with a confession. A little dry with some pressure. It’d be gone in a moment. So let me cut you with it. A thousand times more then you’d know the difference.
Sometimes it’s just too scary a task to write. A scalpel gliding across the paper could cut through the wrong vein, and in less than a minute, words would flood in constant streams of blood, seeping into the fibers of the sheet. What if the patterned stains are not aesthetically pleasing by chance, hazy like Monet or spotty like Van Gogh? What if they paint more like a child’s doodle or, even worse, a postmodernist interpretation of modernity? If one is to slit open a fossilized scab, the bloody act must be for something good. It’d better be for an elaborated think piece, a well-articulated manifesto, an arduously crafted orchestra composition, an excruciatingly drawn-out six-sequel novel series, an award-winning tour-de-force film and its TV adaptations, and an immortalized, history-defining, humanity-preserving sculpture gilded and placed as the centerpiece in the Louvre—otherwise, what is the point of suffering the cut? The knee-jerk reaction when one accidentally brushed over the crusted wound, the sudden thud of something collapsing in the chest, the strobe light blinding the sight, the invisible brick wall striking the head, the abrupt vacuum pressurizing the lungs, and the ensuing shame for feeling the heat in the eyes—what are they all about, if not meaningless overreactions without a cause?
They must somehow dress us as sophisticated artists; otherwise, we are just whimpering monsters covered in permanent marks.
Right?