The Irony of Limited Jobs for Creative Writing, or, the post formerly known as: I Could Use a New Job in a Month

This blog was going to start as a babble of some sorts on trying to look for a job that allows me time/space/energy to write and is enjoyable enough in and of itself.  Then I continued reading a really great book today, the Alphabet vs. The Goddess, and it got me thinking.  It's known that it's almost impossible to find a job if you're a creative writer that you can actually make money off of.  Being a writer in modern Western culture is more a respected/rarely understood lifestyle that sometimes makes money than a job.  However, money as we know it would not exist without the writing of stories.
The first stories written in an alphabet (defined as 30 letters or less and each letter represents a sound, not a word or image) are myths.  The Illiad and the Torah.  Both set precedence for how a culture works.  What was written as well as the existence of an alphabet lead to the belief in abstract thought.  While the basis of hunter gather societies, cave painters, and writers of image based languages was in the concrete, the very existence of an alphabet meant that letters were stand alone parts that could create any word, thus any phrase, sentence, meaning, imaginable possibility.

In a concrete, image based world, barter makes sense.  I want chickens.  You want a vase.  Let's exchange.  Then as text is developed, the idea of symbols that do not directly correlate to what they represent rises, and the shift is from gold (again, an item given value by a culture believing in abstract thought) to different units of money that for what they were alone were worthless, but were seen as representing gold and therefore value.  This is an abridged version of a lot of things discussed in that book, and of the history of money.  In other words, believing in letters and an alphabet permitted hte belief in money.

However, whenever a text based culture and a non text based culture met, it was almost without fail that no matter the outcome, the textual language would live on, and the ones who wielded written word in a culture would become dominant (i.e. the Brahmin priest rise over the warrior caste in India).  Text continued to dominate the world as a means of communication or as a way of ruling the ones who didn't have it.  (Still true if you look at the correlation of literacy and job rates.) The usage of writing, a tool initially used to cement/record stories, not only created the possibility of money but continues to control who has the money.

In conclusion, money, arguably a form of myth, would not exist without writers who told stories through poetry.  I'm a nice Jewish boy who is hugely into Greek Mythology and writes narrative poems.  Anyone wanna pay me for a job that helps my writing and call it even?

Not-Quite-Starving-Artistly-Yours,
Jason