Why I write (explained by smarter people):

"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words." --Philip K. Dick (1928-1982)

Doesn't the very idea of being able to manipulate the way in which people conceive reality just turn you on???? (that's from me... not philip k. dick)

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Poetry in general seems to have sprung from two causes, each of them lying deep in our nature. First, the instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood, one difference between him and other animals being that he is the most imitative of living creatures, and through imitation learns his earliest lessons; and no less universal is the pleasure felt in things imitated. We have evidence of this in the facts of experience. Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity: such as the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies. The cause of this again is, that to learn gives the liveliest pleasure, not only to philosophers but to men in general; whose capacity, however, of learning is more limited. Thus the reason why men enjoy seeing a likeness is, that in contemplating it they find themselves learning or inferring, and saying perhaps, 'Ah, that is he.' For if you happen not to have seen the original, the pleasure will be due not to the imitation as such, but to the execution, the coloring, or some such other cause.

Imitation, then, is one instinct of our nature. Next, there is the instinct for 'harmony' and rhythm, meters being manifestly sections of rhythm. Persons, therefore, starting with this natural gift developed by degrees their special aptitudes, till their rude improvisations gave birth to Poetry.

---Aristotle, Poetics

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The very act of writing is an imitation of life...an execution of an idea, the metamorphosis of something intangible into action. maybe i write because the very process of putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) is therapeutic... being able to create something shows me that i can come to rational conclusions, when oftentimes in the real world conclusions seem forced upon me. Aristotle brings up such a great point with his "Ah, that is he." The pleasure we find in reading stems from the recognition of our own face in the mirror of literature (in Aristotle's point, poetry). It is the realization of a commonality--the moment when we discern within a piece of writing that part which is familiar because it relates. writing (and reading) keeps us in touch with our own facilities for higher knowledge--brings to the forefront an a priori recognition of our own sentience. "Ah, that is HE"--- not "that is IT."

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"So we beat on, boats against the current,
borne back ceaselessly into the past."

--F. Scott Fitzgerald