when there are no customers

I guess I'm not going to respond to bizness's lovely post--ahh, bizness how I do miss you and your spoken words that lead nowhere (unlike your written ones)--largely because, well, I simply don't read anymore. Either I'm becoming a Philistine or I'm writing a damn good novel; the jury will be in sometime this winter, b?

Okay, but here is what I want to write:

I'm meant to speak at a wedding this spring. Not a toast, but something spoken, something written by me and spoken during the ceremony, somewhere near the front of a church in northern Ohio. All places I have either not recently or ever been familiar with. Speaking of love, speaking in a church, that state--all foreign to me.

But that is not what I've come here to speak of.

Because this person is very special to me, extraordinarily special to me, I think she is the finest person I've ever known. bizness will know her as my perfect friend. I don't know how to describe it--she's just a good, good, incredibly accomplished, quite intelligent person who happens to have the levelest head I know--

she's just, like, a wise person, you know? She's one of those people about whom you can only and most fittingly say is 'wise.' And so I've got to say something at her wedding.

Leaving aside how honored, et cetera et cetera, and also how genuinely surprised--she also has a lot of friends? people who are, too, ostensibly wonderful?--I want to ask the following question:


If I never wrote anything worthwhile and if I never got published, indeed if I stopped writing after that wedding, and if I what I write for that occasion--the occasion of the wedding of a wonderful person in the world and my life--is perfectly suited, brings down the house and honors them fittingly...if that is it for me, and nothing more, will my ability as a writer have been well discharged? I mean, can anything possibly be that important? And would I dare trade? And would it be ignominious if I did?

I'm not really asking a utilitarian question--as in, are five minutes in Ohio worth sacrificing the value to later generations of a larger body, et cetera (and we're glad Fyodor didn't trade in his share of the canon for a wedding speech on a winter afternoon in Russia)--so much as...wondering what use is our gift? This gift that we all share. Why do we have it? And what's it worth? And is it still worth(y/while/et al) even if we never get published? Or if what we get published is not well received...?

There's a saying, from some Native American tribe if my quotations calendar of that year of my high school life is to be trusted, and it goes something like this:

If you sell diamonds, you cannot expect many customers. But a diamond is still a diamond, even if there are no customers.

Obviously, or maybe not so obviously, this is--I would like this to be a continuation of the thread started by jesmimi, and taken by me in perhaps another, different direction than she had intended it, but still, here we are, debating, I hope, what we think of as the true value of what we have, and why we have it, and if it retains value whether or not we use it for commercial purposes. And whether or not it feels valuable. Because I mean, what is a diamond if you're standing in the middle of a desert or at the bottom of the ocean, drowning or dying of thirst, but what we've got in our hands...there's this thing in the palm of your hands....

Or maybe I'm saying something else--can someone tell me what I mean? Because words are always like windows anyway, refracting light by various degrees, and I might be drunk and I'm definitely listening to eddie's iPod, and I'll be fucked if I can trust anything I write when I'm listening to people like Deathcab for Cutie. Because they can be so good.