Publishing Has Been an Exercise in Censorship for the Last 50 Years
If you've been denied a platform it's because you're speaking more truth than the privileged can handle
My editor started in with his nonsense again and I wasn’t having any of it.
“I’m not changing it,” I said. “My words are right.”
“How do you know?”
“I know because the universe told me. I’ve spent my whole life listening. On this I am certain. You need to leave well enough alone.”
My editor recoiled because he knew better than to get between a real writer and his muse. I wouldn’t have said this to him had he been a real editor, but editor was only his title. In truth, he was a businessman. He had money so he’d bought a publication.
Bought, not built, big difference.
The thing about having money is that it doesn’t require any talent. He had none, that’s why he needed me. We’d entered into a gentleman’s agreement. He’d pay me, and I’d provide words people actually wanted to read.
That was all well and good. But now he was trying to mess it up with dumb opinions I didn’t need.
“Stay in your lane,” I said. “Your contribution is cash, nothing more. If your opinions were in demand, I never would have gotten through the door.”
You have to talk to rich, entitled people like this every now and then, but the problem is that most writers don’t. Most writers can’t. But I was living abroad at the time, and this job was just a hobby of mine. There wasn’t anyone in the whole country who could write in English as well as I could, and even the entitled expats knew it.
They knew it.
They didn’t want to admit it because privilege recoils from the truth, but they knew it and they knew they needed me because they wanted some legitimacy.
Publications require poetry. Poetry requires truth. I wasn’t a poet then, but I was better than them. I am not a poet yet, but I’m getting close.
What I’ve found is that people with money tend to be dead inside. They look back on their lives smugly, and never realize how much they’ve sacrificed.
They turn to impoverished writers capable of capturing the glowing light of beauty in a jar. This allows even a cold, dead heart to experience the echo of joy from afar.
That’s the transaction. It’s like prostitution but the sentiment on the writer’s side is real. But you have to establish some ground rules or else they’ll paw at you with probing hands that cannot feel.
Most writers don’t know you’re allowed to slap your benefactors around a little bit. It adds to the illusion. I think the world would be a better place if we collectively leaned into this power a little more.
If illusion is so intoxicating, think what reality must be like.
The businessman disguised as an editor pretended that the conversation didn’t happen. That’s the way privileged people and abusers and the talentless always act when they’re defeated. Remember the ancient plays. Think of what the jester is allowed to say. He’ll stand in front of the king and call him a cuckhold. The courtiers laugh. The king laughs. The queen gives a nervous smile.
If anyone else said that, they’d be beheaded. This is our power. You’ve got to flex your muscles every once in a while.
Contradictions surround us. Writers must run the nodal lines between cataclysmic forces without fear.
The businessman turned his attention to flirtation. He tried to pretend people flirted with him, but they were really flirting with his appearance of wealth and power. It was all a lie of course. The wealth, the power, the flirtation, the promise, all of it was a different form of fraud.
He made everyone uncomfortable. He’d reach for them and they’d despair. I did my best to get between him and the vulnerable, but I couldn’t always be there. He thought himself a charmer. He thought himself a lady’s man. He promised to make girls “famous.” I shudder to think of the successes he might have had.
Seduction requires poetry, and he knew not a word.
I flirted for the sake of practice, not for conquest. That’s the difference. Writers know that the object isn’t to possess, you can’t possess. You observe, appreciate, admire, and preserve.
You don’t molest.
Some things, once broken, can’t be fixed. Beauty is that way. The cold hearted monsters break things every day and try to forget. Writers remember and lament.
My editor’s wife came to join us, so the waitress was saved. I smiled at his wife. She smiled back. The color drained from his face.
I complimented her on her wardrobe. She thanked me and glowed. My boss liked this less and less. He knew what he lacked and I was giving a masterclass.
You might think there’d be repercussions, but you’re wrong. These dead inside people don’t reflect on their failures very long. They pretend it didn’t happen. Their cognitive dissonance is so strong that they censor their own experience.
It comes from embracing a life where you destroy beauty. You can’t recognize what you’ve done so you blind yourself to your own activity. They get powerful positions so they can stamp “rejected” on a manuscript that might have changed the course of history.
They can’t bear to see our success, but they need us nonetheless.
It rankled me that I needed him. Why did he have the platform anyway? Who did he steal the money from? Why is it always businessmen who have the final say?
But what I didn’t know then which I recognize now is how censored I have always been. Every grueling step along the way, my words have always been blotted out. The gatekeepers don’t listen to the artists, there are no artists among their ranks. They don’t listen to the poets. They only listen to the banks.
Cruel and powerful people who think they’re admired rather than endured, keep wages down and delude themselves into thinking they control the essence of our words.
These days they’ve clenched their fist so tightly that they believe not even light can get through. Sooner or later they’ll have to see control is an illusion. The public hungers for the truth.
I left the meeting at the cafe. I left the businessmen and his wife. I left the publication. I’ve left various platforms throughout my life.
But I’ll always continue to write.
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This was a beautiful piece. Thank you for reminding us of our power. You are wonderful.
It's nice to be reminded that there are many things money cannot buy.