Whatever it is, it must have
A stomach than can digest
Rubber, coal, uranium, moons, poems.
Like the shark, it contains a shoe.
It must swim for miles through the desert
uttering cries that are almost human.*
We're taking pieces of the world and stringing them together, this is composition. Some bits are crafted and some are thrown together. Later, people pull the threads tighter, create new layers of meaning or dissonance.
In ordinary composition, the composer sure has it over the audience: the work is untouchable. But we've got something better! We are the composers. We are the characters, the creation (of everything, of ourselves): the plot.. editors, the Deus of our machina? We're actors, we're the opposite of people! Ok, but seriously. I hadn't written anything in ages. All of a sudden, there's this new (to me) medium, and i'm writing compulsively (Note: i didn't say well, i said compulsively). We build on each others works, and create a vast, self-referential piece, with intentions of grandeur, Ambrose Bierce impersonations, and large patches of trivia and triviata. So it's community, a database... but even our dry facts are art. They're the shark's shoe, just to show that Everything can assimilate it all, from polyvinyl chloride to a tiny poem i dreamed.
If this isn't nice, what is?
We're assimilating the things that make ourselves (most first novels are veiled autobiographies), from memories to lyrics to insecurities to algorithms. (Help me, i want to make my prose more lightweight, but the words won't cooperate..)
I guess i'm saying this is damn cool, an art form, a shark, the apple of my eye, an obsession, a lament, a party, a drug. We gots gurus and heroes and badasses. We have bad days, sure, and bad ideas, and trolls, and sometimes need a scolding, (or even a whipping, or a whuppin'), and even if people in the chatterbox can't stop talking about voting and XP, still, even then, we're fantastic. Honest. And worth reading, since reading helps compose as well. Almost a better model for reality than reality itself. I think.
*American Poetry, by Louis Simpson | 
