They called me mad. MAD! But I'll show them who's mad. I'LL SHOW THEM ALL! MWAAA HAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA!!

Fear me.

I am sharper than razors, more fatal than cyanide. I will bruise you and drive through you ere will any steel -- no bludgeon nor blade before me. Ice bites and fire devours, but I will flay you and vivisect your bare shriveling agonies on a thought. The slow growth of tumors, the creeping slash of gangrene, are nothing to the pulsing, cracking, bursting invasion of me. The wasting of starvation crouches to heel before my dominion, for I will make your necessities and your foundations into illusions, substanceless, bootless -- dust and ash in your mouth as your belly swells empty with wretched desire. War's madness -- war's destruction -- war's awesome tidal pull that drags all it touches into the acrid, barbaric descent that yawns beneath its surface: a descent into horror, into corruption, into the abyss itself, where humanity dies and all beasts are born: these are nothing to me. I am what stares forth from that abyss, and all the eyes that gaze upon me are my mirrors and my icons, my altars, my apostles. My conquest. My empire.

Death am I, and what comes after.

Power am I, and terrible glory.

There are no words for me, no images; you cannot know me, for I am beyond the ends of infinity, of eternity, and you cannot grasp me, cannot hold me, cannot have me -- your reaching fingers push me farther, push me further. But I am in you, and of you, every one. Every one. I will come to you, on my whim, and you cannot prepare, you cannot anticipate, you can but bow before me or be shattered, disintegrated and swept away as the insignificance you are.

I am coming, now.

I am




I've been arguing recently with a group of people online. We're arguing about a lot of things, from books to education to feminism to sex to children and back the other way, but what we're really arguing about is censorship. The basic disagreement is this: my opponents feel that some books, some novels, should bear warning labels if they contain excessive violence, inappropriate language, or explicit sex. They think that people should be told something of what to expect, so that they will not open that sweet little book about the jolly man in a red suit sneaking into children's houses to leave them the presents they named in candy-scented whispers in his ear while sitting on his lap -- and find out the book isn't about Santa, and that twinkle in his eye isn't from yuletide joy. More important, they think that parents should be warned that the books their children are reading may be inappropriate, so that they can be ready: ready to explain, in painless terms, any and all adult issues to their children; ready to minimize any emotional trauma their child may suffer; or, in the worst case, ready to ensure that their children don't read those books. They see warning labels as a shield against harm, as a way to protect their children, and their own delicate sensibilities, from the shock and pain of illicit ideas.

It's a reasonable position. After all (my opponents are fond of pointing out), music and movies and television shows and video games are all marked with ratings and warnings of explicit or adult material; why shouldn't books be, as well? A mother has the right to know what her child is reading, and it is impossible to know about every possible threat that exists in the wide world of books; even the Bible has sex and violence in it, after all. And children in this country have so much access to books, free books, books that may hold terrible things without giving away a whisper on the cover of what's inside, and even though we teach our children time and again never to judge a book by its cover, they always, always do. And with the way that sex and violence are sneaking into books as they are into every aspect of our popular culture, and the speed with which some kids read, it will be impossible to keep our children away from bad books unless there is some fast and easy way of knowing that a certain book may be bad, some way that a harried and overworked parent can make a somewhat informed decision before it is too late and their child is corrupted or scarred, or both. People have the right to know what is in their books, and parents have a double right, since they are trying to protect children who cannot protect themselves.

It all makes sense. Except it's wrong. It's wrong because books are not the same thing as poison, as electrified fences, as flammable liquids. The damage that books can do is not hazardous to our health: it is good, and it is necessary. Because books are art.

Franz Kafka once wrote, "Books should be the ice ax for the frozen sea within us." It's a good sentiment in several ways: first because it shows something about the power of reading, the power of all art, to break through our defenses and reach out inmost selves, the self we hide behind layers and layers of suffocating masks until it is immobile, insensate, even cold and lifeless -- as if frozen in ice. Our society and its demand for conformity does this to us, to all of us, and it is often a terrible thing, the source of many of our woes and anxieties: the midlife crisis, the search for meaning, the surrogation of cheap, tawdry semblances such as evangelical Christianity and reality TV for true affection and love. Art can break us out of that, because art is a quest for connection, a message sent forth like a groping hand in darkness from the artist, seeking the fingers of another, seeking to grab and hold and touch another person. And because art can only come from that hidden person inside, it is a search for a true and lasting and meaningful connection, rather than the superficial ones we build up into the layers of ice that guard and imprison our true hearts. When an artist and his audience connect, they are connecting soul to soul, heart to heart, and they are both then freed and renewed by it, as if someone had reached into the entrapping ice and given the one drowning within a breath of air, of life. It is powerful, perhaps more powerful than anything else that can do this, because art can reach across miles and years uncountable and make connections between utter strangers, connections that otherwise can only be made through personal interaction, connections that require time and effort and intentionality and coincidence; art can do all these things anonymously, and move us just as much. It is glorious.

It is also -- and this is the second reason Kafka's words are wise -- painful. It hurts to be pulled out of our shells, to have our masks stripped away, and doing so leaves us vulnerable, weak and trembling before the cruel winds of the world. We don't let it happen easily. We cling to our armor, our protective layers, huddling within them and hiding from everything that might get through -- until we become trapped in that frozen sea. We are happier there, frozen solid and dying, than we would be if we were free. At least, we think we are. The cold metaphor is an apt one, perhaps even a perfect one, because holding our true selves inside is much like hypothermia: we don't realize we're falling into it until it is too late, because the sensation shifts gradually from cold to -- numb. As the cold sets in, as the masks we wear become larger, more like cocoons, shielding more and more of our selves from the light and the warmth, and the pain and the shame, we become more comfortable. We start to fall asleep, not realizing that the apparent warm comfort of sleep is actually the cold finality of death. And if we are pulled out of that state, into genuine warmth, the first sensation is actually pain, as the frozen blood and the numbed nerve endings wake up to the fact of their impending demise.

Nobody likes pain; after all, pain hurts. Everything we are, our instincts, our compassion, our souls and our gods, all tell us to avoid and prevent and end pain. But we have to recognize that sometimes, pain is necessary. Pain is even good. The pain in one's limbs as one is brought back from hypothermia to warmth is good. The pain one feels in undergoing and recovering from surgery is good, as it prevents greater pain, and greater damage, from a problem left unsolved. The pain of confronting our loved ones over our differences and our conflicts is good, as it brings people closer together rather than letting them drift apart into cold, alien separations. The pain of forgiveness is what lets us grow and become human, and perhaps more than human some day. As uncomfortable as pain is, we should be thankful for it, because pain is the opposite of death. Numbness and emptiness and the lack of sensation: that is death. Pain: that is life.

Parents try to spare their children pain, but they should not. They should try to keep their children from harm, not from pain. This mistake, this misidentification of pain as harm, is at the root of many of our society's worst problems. It is the justification, both individually and socially, for drug use and abuse, because drugs prevent pain, and pain is harm. It is the reason we have stopped punishing our children, because pain is harm, and thus have lost any hope of turning them into responsible and complete adults, who can be selfless enough to help others in times of need. It is the reason we can sue McDonald's for having hot coffee, and the reason McDonald's can sue us for using the "Mc" prefix on our business cards. It is the reason we are at war, the reason we think we can win, and the reason we are wrong.

Saving people from pain does them harm. Apart from some of the obvious instances such as I named above, saving people from pain is saving them from life -- and if we are not alive, what are we? If we protect our children from the pain of knowing and recognizing death, we prevent them from understanding and valuing the wonder of life, because they do not know or recognize life's opposite. Children today are not jaded by watching too many murders on television -- they are jaded by not understanding the reality behind the illusions. They are jaded because the murders they see are false, and real murders are kept hidden behind a green curtain. The only way we can protect our children from all pain is to armor them, to swaddle them, to cover every inch of them in an impenetrable shield, and to teach them to do the same for themselves when we are not around. It is to put them in the ice, and freeze them there. It is the same as killing them.

We must be willing to break through our own layers of ice, to free our arms in order that we might swing those ice axes, use those picks and hammers and tongs, those hard and violent instruments, to break out all of the others, to free them and give them the breath of life and the gift of pain as sensation and warmth returns to their cold and dying bodies. To return this to practical terms: we must be willing to allow our children to see and hear and think about hard and ugly and brutal and sorrowful things, like death and war and disease and hatred, so that they may understand the pain of such things and will never inflict them on others simply because they do not know, or do not care, that it hurts. We must let our children read books like Night, like The Grapes of Wrath, like The Stranger -- and like the Bible, the Koran, the meditations of the Buddha, the Kama Sutra and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the plays of Shakespeare and the poetry of ee cummings and the works of Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein -- so that they may step out from behind their masks, behind their shields, step into the warm light and the cold wind of life and death, of love and hate, of sorrow and joy: step out so they may live. Live, and share that life with others, swing their own freed arms carrying their own sharp tools, and break through the ice to someone else, and bring that other person out as well, kicking and screaming and bleeding into the world.

Maybe someday this will not have to hurt. Maybe someday we will not have to fear this pain, this labored, bloody birthing from the icy womb we have built for ourselves. Maybe someday we will not have to break out, but will all be simply free: the ice will melt, the numbness will fade, and we will be free to live life, out loud and wide open, every minute of every day. But that someday is not today. And so today, and every day, I will be an artist. I will push myself out of my own frozen sea, and I will reach out to others with my art, with my words, and I will seek that connection, even if it hurts us both. I will try as hard as I can, with every weapon at my disposal, to fight against those who would protect us, who would shelter us, who would push us down into the smothering, consuming, killing ice of innocence and ignorance. And if that makes me cruel, so be it. And if it makes those whom I touch cry out in pain, so be it: I will know that they live. Believe me, it hurts me more than it hurts you.

Warning labels on books, on music, on movies and television and video games: in every instance, they are an attempt to protect people from sensation, from experiencing genuine emotions like fear and anger and exhilaration and lust and despair and strength and weakness and spite and avarice and loathing. They are an attempt to sanitize the world, to make it pure and white as the driven snow -- as smooth and tranquil as the surface of a frozen sea. But to what end? Warning labels do not keep us from harm. They are an attempt to save us pain, and thus they do us harm. They are the enemy of all art, and thus the enemy of all life. Their invasion should never have been allowed to proceed as far as it has, but we have, with only a few exceptions, followed a policy of appeasement. (Thank you, Frank Zappa, Dee Snider, Robert Mapplethorpe, Salman Rushdie, and all the other fighters and martyrs who have tried to hold the line.) We have allowed the fascists, the icemen, to take the Sudetenland, and now they are eyeing Poland and France.

No more. Perhaps I sound extreme, perhaps this seems insane; but then, I am an artist. All artists are insane, by simple virtue of the fact that artists see the world differently, think in ways that deviate from the norm -- a clear definition of insane, and one I, as do most of my fellow artists and rabble-rousers and iconoclasts, cherish. And in the lucidity of my madness, I know this to be true: warning labels, and ratings, and minimum ages for purchase, are the enemy. They are layers of ice that their proponents would lay over us all, would use to protect us from life, just for now, until we're old enough to live (We'll ignore the fact that a child, protected from anything harmful or ugly for another year, will make no progress toward the maturity needed to handle those ugly, harmful things, and when the six-year-old faces the things hidden from his five-year-old self, he will react exactly as he would have a year before, no better, no easier, no less harmed or affected. Just a year behind the times, a year delayed from reaching true acceptance and freedom. Good plan.). I will not let labels be used to dull the ice axes of books, of art, the very tools we need to break free, nor to numb the pain we must face in order to live and breathe and move, to kiss and embrace, to sing and dance, to sleep and wake, to be free, now, live now, be our true selves now. My arm is free, and my words are sharp.

Here I come.

I am art.