The Dialectic

by Karyn Hall

The critic within me hovers with a lethal pen, searching for the indecisive like a heat-seeking missile, attacking the maybes, all the indefinites used to tell my story, tearing them out of the manuscript with the vigor of a superhero on megavitamins and shakes his head with disbelief at the incompetence of the tale’s creator who let his protagonist wander hopelessly out of character. He groans in delight when he chances upon liberally sprinkled adjectives and adverbs used to bring life to a fictional world, to offer a verbal painting to the reader, and smears them into oblivion with bright red ink. Yet the artist within me argues passionately that life is filled to overflowing with uncertainty, screams infinite color rather than black and white, and embraces those who act out of character as eccentrics, heroes, and innovators. She’s certain of her wisdom, knowing the world is not simple but made up of miraculously different beauties, requiring mixtures of words to convey their unique scent, texture, color and form. The artist and the critic live like Palestine and Israel, marking out their territories, struggling for power with each believing fervently in a different truth. There are days the resulting dialectic destroys, like a suicide bomber, and other times when it hits a perfect harmony creating work that I did not know could come from me.

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Karyn Hall can be reached here.