Luke's Litany (from THE TOY BUDDHA)

LUKE'S LITANY

I mean get real, Billy, it was never my intention to start a new religion. I have serious reservations about the current wave of compulsory spirituality that's sweeping the nation. What I truly enjoy about all this is just being out here on the road. Something primal in me needs to see the road, hear it, breathe it, touch it, taste it. On the road I'm alive–that's it in a nutshell–I'm a live wire, electric Luke. As you must know from your own imaginary life, the road has an amazing way of draining existence of its numbing banality, slaying the Medusa of Routine, restoring that thrilling sense of the Adventure without which we're merely neutered corporate robots. It may indeed be true not all who wander are lost, but it's a fact all those who don't wander are. But then again there's a part of me missing out here, that whole solitary writer part of me that just wants to hole up in a lonely cabin in the woods somewhere and tap away on my wood-burning word processor like a regular literary pioneer, the Dan'l Boone of Letters. I mean if you're going to be a writer, for Christ's sake, be a writer. But it's hard, you know, as liberating as it is on the one hand, all this contemporary creative freedom can be a drag, too, this having the world as your oyster and carte blanche to write about anything or nothing. Sometimes I think the authorial one I've chosen for myself is the heaviest of possible lives. Not that it lacks ecstasy and times comparable to soaring through the heavens on wings, but so often the underbelly is made of lead three feet thick. I'm thinking in particular of the political question. You know me, Billy, aesthetically I may lean toward the avant-garde, but politically I'm smack in the radical middle, more of an accidental anarchist than an earnest engagé. Yet I'll be damned if there’s not this little voice that pipes up in my head from time to time that urges me to make a difference. You know: ditch art for art's sake and strive to change the way people think, free them from the rusty shackles of so-called reality, expand minds, open hearts, unclench fists, broaden horizons, stir up dreams, empower my readers to create their own lives just as we have, force Congress to pass a law requiring warning labels on novels like mine: “WARNING: May cause vertigo, euphoria, lunatic laughter. May cause you to get angry, see things in a whole new way, ask questions, quit your job, slug your boss, cheat on your spouse, screw the IRS, anachronistically expose the truth behind 9/11 because we all know in advance they did it. May fundamentally alter you so the old rules no longer apply, so it's okay if clothes become optional, okay to make love not war, okay to set fire to your country club, dig up your neighborhood golf course, plant an organic garden and build your new community one puff at a time.” I was lying when I said I didn't give a damn about changing the world. I do give a damn. To hell with being a writer just so you can smoke cigarettes and look cool. Not that I wouldn't like to be famous. I mean famous for my fictional oeuvre not because I happened to be in the right place at the right time when the Buddha reappeared. Who knows, maybe I'll publish under a pseudonym to test the waters and see what kind of response I generate based solely on my own merits, some unknown but classic-sounding pen name, something with a catchy rhythm that subtly mirrors my own name … like Sol Luckman. Sol Luckman, Sol Luckman–I like that. But whether anybody ever figures out I'm a genius is beside the point when you consider what touching a single human life could mean. I know, I know, that scooter accident must have knocked a few screws loose, but every now and then I get a little self-righteous in my desire to be a positive influence. Please shoot me if I ever become unapologetically moralistic. But when I look around and see people so lost, so miserable, so needy, so greedy, so ruthless, so rueful, so hateful, so hurtful, so small-minded, so brain-dead, so hypnotized, so enslaved, I just want to do justice to the work of Art Life can be, touch people's souls and set them quivering with their own music, make them feel alive again–if not for the very first time. Go ahead. Laugh. Call me crazy, unrealistic, a hopeless romantic, a Don Quixote. Or just call me inspired.