Yes. I believe all industries should be run like a professional sports team. If you cant compete, you dont eat. If someone younger, faster, smarter, better comes around, then you should be forced to step up your game, or you lose your position.
I see it as the pendellum of Establishment. Those trying to establish themselves build a system of merit. While those already established rebuild those same systems into status machines. One group wants to grow in status, the other wants to sustain the status they already have.
Unfortunately this muddles the waters. People invest large gobs of wealth into their education, their equipment and in their lifestyles more then in their skills and talents. The last thing they want is to be blown away by someone dirty off the streets.
And this is why competition in the arts are so much the more important. Because nobody likes investing hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions just to learn that someone off the streets actually put in the hard work on their talent. Its a bitter realization. But what is equally frustrating is not having a clear playing field where society has the ability to judge for themselves.
In essence, some people arent as talented as others. Its a hard fact of life. Some people are born stronger, healthier, smarter then others. I watched a hummingbird fight another male for dominiance over a bird feeder. Their was enough to share but if the weaker bird had the biological upper hand, wouldnt they use it? Us humans use our financial upper hand against each other all the time, and theirs nothing natural about ink on paper.
Mostly I just want to know where I rank against my peers. If I can't compete freely like the great rock bands and pulp writers of the past and even that was mostly rigged, I dont feel an intetest to participate in this system. Nor contribute to it.
And if their comes a day where my works gets compared to the rest of my peers with wide eyes and opened minds, and the general agreement is that this whole writing thing was my crux, my folly, my downfall, I can live with that. Thats not what bothers me. Its being denied the right for the whole world to decide for themselves. Because long as I know where I rank, I know what the next step I need to make.
Because I might not be where I want to be today doesnt mean I cant climb above the rest to new peaks further down the road. I dont see my life, my current situation as a book but as a chapter. Where I am today is not where I'll be ten, twenty years from now. So I'll keep climbing this writing mountain to the top; because the way I see it, survival of the fittest. I'm not here to lift you up when you fall off this hill, I'm here to take your hooks and keep climbing.
Its harsh but the blunt truth of it puts fire water in my veins, reminds me that I'm alive. I want to be pushed to my breaking point, forced to tapp into those hidden pockets of talent denied us by lackluster leadership. And yet, I feel, sense a knowing, that if I continue this climb, good things are bound to happen. I can feel it in my bones.
