Jerry Karn

I find it difficult to wrap my mind about isolation from a writers perspective, but here are some thoughts...  

In one respect we all write in isolation.  The scribe, who dipped his quill and marked the parchment, while the lord spoke on, the tune may have beef royal edict or royal blather, but the writing was the scribe’s, a product of his mind directing his hand.  The monk, physically isolated in a monastic tower, translated religious thought.  Religiously diligent? Maybe.  For most of the history of man, the reader has been the exception and the writer more so.   Until a few hundred years ago they were isolated islands of knowledge in a sea of ignorance.   Even today amid social chatter of a cafe or the quiet of his attic, it’s the writer’s fingers on the keyboard.  I have always given great deference to the power of the hand that holds the brush or the pen.

On the other hand, who’s isolated?  We may write privately, but we write principally from acquired knowledge.  The delivered baby can’t write, he is taught to write and when taught he doesn’t write about his view of amniotic fluid,  He writes of things, of people and events.  He brings his personal style and feelings, sure, but they didn’t come from isolation.  They came from  his DNA, his ancestors and his culture.

And why does a writer write.  Some may write to purge the soul, but I think most writers have something to say to someone.  That sounds like the opposite of isolation to me.  I guess I question the term isolation.   Unhappiness, rebellion, cynicism or just writing to a different drumbeat, all might be better than isolationism.  

Well, thats’s not long enough and definitely not deep enough, right off the top of my head, but a shear pin lodged in my baler which sits in a field of windrows, strawberries that need picking and a helluva lot of mowing to do.