Writing Against the Flames

aka, HAPPY NEW YEAR, I think?
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By Zach Hively

I live in paradise. It’s not everyone’s idea of paradise: if, for instance, you appreciate access to such modern amenities as reliable internet and trash service, this is not paradise. 

But it is my version of heaven on earth—most of the time. Even I have my moments. Like the other day, just before New Year’s Eve, I was walking my dogs down our neighborhood arroyo. Normally this is paradisiacal. But this time, we were following some a-hole’s ATV tire treads tearing through the sagebrush, and pretty quickly we came upon their heap of ashes and burned cans and bottles dumped right in the middle of where my dogs like to walk.

To be clear: we do not like to walk through a public dump. This is, in fact, privately owned property. We have permission to walk through this land from the landowner, because the landowner is me, and this stretch of arroyo is basically right outside my front door.

Now, the compassionate, thinking part of my brain—the part that was not shouting obscenities to see if I could hear an echo and get double the swearing satisfaction—recognizes that people have been dumping garbage in arroyos here for many, many more years than I have been alive. And, what choice does one have when one’s county trash service is, by all accounts, corrupt? (If it even exists in the first place, which is also dubitable.) 

But this is not my rant and rave about ATVs and illegal dumping and misuse of county funds. This is all merely to keep you from thinking that my chosen home is so idyllic that you should build your vacation house here. Also, it is to illustrate why even those of us who live in paradise need a holiday.
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So to relax, unwind, and get a fresh perspective on life, I went to Belgium in the fall, when it was wet and damp and miserable, even to Belgians. And, to cheer myself up, I went to a museum exhibit on book censorship.

(Citing my source: the exhibit is (Un)chained Knowledge, held in the University Library at KU Leuven. It’s up for another week. Still time to book your ticket!)

It won’t surprise you to learn that I think a book is one of the most sacred human-made things (both as an object and as an idea) on this planet. You can’t compare it to something like, say, the arroyo out my front door—except that both are intensely sacred, and I never come so close to understanding vengeance heroes like Batman and Inigo Montoya as I do when people thrash what I hold most holy.

Some of the censorship on display was laughable in its execution, such as these naked ladies given skirts to shield our eyes from their hand-drawn genital regions:

​Some of the censorship bowled me over with its brazenness—like, why even keep the book if this is what you’re going to do to it? (P.S. — still pretty legible, numbnuts.)

Some of the censorship made me cry. And not the way that, very occasionally, other museum exhibits have made me cry (out of awe, or beauty, or wonder), but out of recognizing pieces of my own humanity torn from me that I never even knew were missing:

You’ve heard of book burnings. Maybe you’ve seen pictures of book bonfires. Maybe you’ve seen Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Maybe you’ve even seen the remnants of a house fire, recognized pieces of books and other belongings tragically destroyed.
Maybe I have too. But I had never, ever seen a book that had been willfully burnt. 
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This wasn’t, like the Beowulf manuscript, some fragment rescued from a tragic fire. This was a partial survivor of a willful inferno, in 1914, by an occupying force deciding to decimate a university library—the very library I was standing in at that moment.

My friends moved onward through the exhibit. They let me linger. We didn’t even talk about the burned books afterwards. I didn’t know what to say, exactly. I still don’t, except to say this:
This is why I write.

Writing is cheap, now. Probably cheaper than ever. Not even going into AI (which is not writing, but accumulation of words, advanced plagiarism), but normal people-writing. Anyone can publish a book now, for negligible or even no monetary cost. We are flooded with books. Millions of new ones every year. And that’s not counting all the internet writing! 

But this does not—it cannot—lessen the worth of a book as an idea. Of any written expression, or any creative expression, as an act of being human and shouting it to the world to see if it echoes back. 

I don’t think what I write is particularly important. I doubt our modern-day Nazis are going to come burn my books on purpose, unless incidentally as part of a whole library-burning. I like that sometimes I make one of my readers smile, and that sometimes I get a note from my other reader because I used a bad word, like “numbnuts.” 

But writing them? Writing these pieces on Substack for you? Writing, period? It’s my barbaric yawp to the world. No one can possibly burn every one of these millions of new books—partly because many of them are eBooks, but also because their matches can’t keep up with us. Their flames cannot truly lick our paradise.

Which is all to say, believe it or not, happy new year to both of you, my darling readers. This is a year of redoubling my efforts to actually put my writing in your eyeballs. Like many writers, I’m good at the writing part (though never as good as I want to be), and terrible at knowing how to share it.

So I’m going to bumble my way through it, here, with you, every week. I welcome your input on what you like, what you want more of, what makes you want to share with your friends. Use the ol’ comments section below.

And, as subscribers, you’ll be the first to know of new things. Like, new books (and cover reveals and bears, oh my!). And workshops. (Like Misfit Poetry, next Thursday!)

Thank you for being here, for reading—not just my work, but in general. It’s the best way we have of giving the bird to the censors out there, both the blatant ones and the more covert.

Zach’s Substack is free. The free stuff today will remain free tomorrow. Someday, he might offer additional stuff. Zach+, as it were. You can tell Zach that you value his work by pledging a future paid subscription to additional stuff. You won't be charged unless he enables payments, and he’ll give a heads-up beforehand.

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