An Addiction to Ink

Sometimes in life there are things that we witness or even do ourselves that seem to haunt our very existence. These "ghosts" as we have come to call them--as if they actually have souls however small they may be--seem to overtake our minds at times. A few of my "ghosts" have become immortal. However maybe this occurred not through any action of their own but rather through my own hands, my own fingers, as I have written of them on paper for hours and hours on end. In the words of Susan Griffin, a military historian, "If these pages, too, are thick with death it is because the written page is where memory is brought back from the burial ground and kept alive." 

Since the beginning of time there has been war: war against God, or the freedom thereof, war against our brothers, neighboring cities and mother countries. In the book of Exodus, chapter fifteen verse three, it is said, "The Lord is a man or war." But why, if we see only death can come from this, have living creatures persisted? In a book by James Hillman he writes, "Since 1975 the globe has been engaged in wars in Haiti, Grenada, the Falklands, Peru, Panama, Israel, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait; in Uganda Rwanda, Mozambique, Angola, Sierra, Leone, Liberia, Congo, Eritrea, Chad, Mauritania, Somalia, Algeria (again), Sudan; in Afghanistan, Myanmar, India/Pakistan, Kashmir, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Cambodia, East Timor, Sumatra, Irian; in Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo, Ireland, Checknya, Georgia, Romania, Basque/Spain... You may know of others; still others that only the participants know of." 

Is this actually a part of who we, as humans, are? As I have seen in the news, history books and even the Bible, I have come to have a firm belief that it may be the basis of all life. So then, if there have been wars over so little, it is very possible to have a "war" over the simplest: a broken heart, a joke, protecting someone or being protected yourself. It is very possible and even probable that one can destroy him/her/itself if anything is done "wrong" to, well... him/her/itself. But is it really us who destroy ourselves or these "ghosts" we've imagined? I fear that if it is my ghosts which destroy me them it is only because I could not stop my addiction to ink. So then, if this is true, the ghosts might not even have any say in their "eternity in chaos" because they were put on their pages due to the chaos they cause while they were being committed (remember: they are not objects with souls, simply actions); and who is to say that they can change? Is it possible for the mind to murder the heart; the memory to break the soul into a thousand pieces? Is it probable for a person to die simply because they lived? In how many ways is the saying, "I've been dying since I was born" really true?