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It takes one to know one.
I didn't know discovering The Literary Matrix was my destiny until I became a tutor in the Writing Lab at my college. It was there, in that magical place, in those cozy little cubicles that I realized I was meant to help people. I was passionate about helping people write and if I wasn't using that passion daily then I would be wasting it. For the past few years, I echoed that sentiment in my mind again and again until recently, I revised it to this: I was meant to help people discover their voice.
Now, if you’ve ever taken an English class with me you know that there are two things I never shut up about.
1. The act of reading and writing is like joining a conversion all around the world
2. The Literary Matrix.
This is the story of how I discovered these things...
It began when I was a freshman in college taking a course titled "Naturalism and Determinism." We read things like Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth and I began to think very deeply about what it means to have agency over your own fate. How much of our fate is determined by the physical and environmental factors given -or rather- assigned to us by the universe?
That's a question I can't answer. But I wrote a paper titled “Metaphysical Determinism in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth” and tried to answer it anyway. I used Stephen Crane’s poem “A man said to the universe” to frame my thesis. In my research for this paper I came across a few theorists and I began to slowly change the way I thought about literature.
I was reminded of theories my high school English teacher exposed me to in our creative writing class: The String Theory, the Many- Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Theory and the Temporal Paradox (in short, you can't go back in time or you'd undo the future and thus, would not be able to go back in time. Trippy, right?!)
I truly believed in my own mash-up of all of these theories. I believed I had proven that time travel was possible. No Joke. To read more about my Temporal Quantum-String Theory, read here.
The bottom line is, I can’t actually prove that every decision I’ve ever made has played out in multiple different possibilities and realities. I can't actually prove that time travel is possible (can I?).
But I can prove that there are infinite versions of me.
Every single time I write, I am leaving a piece of my voice behind (die-hard Death of the Author critics are screaming right now, can you hear them?). And each person who reads a thing I wrote encodes and interprets my voice uniquely. It's true, perhaps multiple people will read my writing and extract the same meaning, but in reality no one reader is exactly alike.
This means that as a writer, my voice exists out there in the universe multiple times. And when I die, my voice will continue to exist, again and again because the written word cannot die. Especially in today’s age when everything we write just gets taken up into the internet, into this social media matrix cloud that holds everything. I’m not just talking about poems or books or essays..I’m talking about blogs, tweets and statuses, comments, texts and emails and every. single. time. I use my voice to write.
Think about it.
So if we scale back a minute and really take a moment to look at the definition of literature: a body of written works. Traditionally, imaginative works of poetry and prose distinguished by the intentions of their authors and the perceived aesthetic excellence of their execution...
We can possibly exclude things like tweets and texts for the time being and narrow our focus to the imaginative works of prose and poetry and then we have it…
The Literary Matrix
It’s where millions of writers’ voices exist- the published, the unpublished the past
present and new writers all exist here in this space between the physical and the infinite where lovers of literature discover the true power of the written word and in that power exist the quantum of your own voice. Infinite possibilities, energy and potential- that’s what YOU bring to the table each and every time you use your voice.
Your voice matters. Surround yourself with the people who empower you to share your thoughts, opinions and perspectives with the world. Become part of The Literary Matrix just by using your voice to empower and inspire others. Indulge in reading diversified texts and voices- it truly is like joining an ongoing conversation all around the world. This is a language that we can all share if only we listen and read between the lines in that space between the physical and the infinite.
This is The Literary Matrix and I personally invite you to join.
You can get started today! Subscribe and become a member and don't forget to check out The Literary Matrix Forum for news, musings and inspiration.
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