From Word To Word

People always want to begin with writing, but good writing is an ending before it is a beginning, a culmination before it is an inauguration.  As I mentioned a few weeks ago, good writing is preceded by slow and careful reading, by thoughtful and patient reflection, and by learned and leisurely conversation.  Writing that does not proceed from these things is deficient.

Slow and Careful Reading – It is better to read one book very well than to read many poorly.  Being well-read should never be confused with being much-read.  Many people read much without ever reading at all.  There are fewer people who truly read well.  Though they may perhaps read less, they are the readers who gain from their practice.

Good reading approaches the text slowly, attentively, with an openness to what might be thought through it, with an openness to being interrupted by reflection and by conversation.  There is no substitute for this time and for this attention.  It permits what is not us, what is other than us, to approach us through the text.  The text is not itself of the greatest importance.  It is the site through which we are encountered by what is of the greatest importance, and its value is in how well it provokes us to be so encountered.

Good reading leaves its mark on the text.  It writes in the margins, and it turns the corners of pages, and it notes its favourite passages with bookmarks, even if it does these things only figuratively.  A book that is well read is stained with fingerprints and coffee stains, even if only in metaphor.  It is well used.  It is a tool that has become worn to fit the mind that is reading it.

Thoughtful and Patient Reflection – It is necessary to reflect on reading whenever something calls through the text, whenever the text provokes, but also regularly, as a discipline.  To reflect is to engage in the exercise of thinking as if it were a religious act, as if it was the rule of a monastic order, in order that it might sometimes become a spiritual act, beyond the rule of any order.  It is to order one’s mind so that it might be prepared more fully for what will come to disorder it entirely.

Reflection is always accompanied by a writing that is not a writing, a secret and secretive writing, notes and jottings, incoherences and incomprehensibles, a writing that will never appear as a writing to be read, a writing that remains hidden and unread.  It is a writing that is also a rereading,  a returning to the places in the text that need mastication, rumination, regurgitation.  This writing chews the text like a cow chews its cud, again and again.  It digests the text, gains sustenance from the text, takes the text into itself, makes the text a part of itself.

Reflection is a wondering and a wandering.  It follows the text to other texts and returns them to where they began. It takes its time as it wanders.  It does not run or even walk.  It strolls.  It ambles.  It perambulates.  It wallows in its journey through the text, follows it wherever it leads.  It is not concerned with a destination, at least not now, not yet.  It leaves destinations to the future and reserves for the present a certain forgetfulness of what the future might demand.   Its purpose is to see what might be encountered now on its path through the text, spiritually, emotionally, intellectually, not to create a coherent text of its own.

This activity, this reflection, this meditation, is essential.   It must not be hurried.  It is not brainstorming or some other such technique.  It is an openness to the text, a willingness to give the text time and space, a discipline of doing the text justice.

Learned and Leisurely Conversation – Conversation is not mere group discussion.  It is not mere argument.  It is not mere chatter.  It is a coming together through the text, where the text becomes a site where we catch sight of one another.  There are always too few of these opportunities to converse, always.  They must be treasured when they arise, guarded jealously, so that they are not overwhelmed by the many things that are less important but more pressing.

Conversation involves a careful listening of one another.  It considers what the other has to say.  It considers what it will reply before it replies.  It takes its time, so it is not afraid to pause.  It is willing to say less and have it be meaningful than to say much and to have it be mere chatter. It knows that it is better to give things their proper time.

Conversation is being on the way together, is helping one another along the way.  It turns us in the same direction, puts us shoulder to shoulder.  Though we may turn our eyes to one another, our feet are always on the path together, following the same path together, so that we might draw nearer to what it is we are seeking.  Whatever disagreements we may have between us, conversation always agrees, before all else, to walk the path together.

Conversation is also sitting at the table together, breaking bread together, recognizing what is other to us through the breaking of bread.  It is the invitation to the table and the acceptance of the table.  It is sitting face to face.  It is having more between us than words.  It is also having between us a giving, and a hospitality, and an invitation, and an acceptance.  It allows us to digest each other’s words like bread and wine, to make each other’s words a part of us.

Conversation never ends.  It is always being suspended for a time, but it is never ended, except by death.

Writing -  Only in the context of these disciplines of reading and reflection and conversation, only in the context of these practices, that writing can begin.  Indeed, these disciplines will produce writing, inevitably.  Though this writing may take many forms, it will become a necessity in the one who reads and reflects and converses.  It will become, not a task to be undertaken, not an ideal to be fulfilled, but a hunger to be satisfied, a thirst to be quenched, a lust to be satiated.

This is what there is to be learned.  This is the learning that teaching must let be.  This is the learning that teaching must let be learned.

If I was to read as slowly, as carefully, as truly, as reading demands, I would never read more than a page, or a paragraph, or a sentence, or a word, yes, a word, but I would need only to read this word again and again, to make it say, not all that it was meant to say, not all that it could ever say, but all that I could make it say, or, perhaps better, perhaps gentler, perhaps more hospitable, all that I could ask it to say, and this asking, this interrogation, this inquisition, which would certainly remain, however gentle and hospitable, without doubt an inquisition, would become eternal, or become eternally, or be coming eternally, or some other combination of these words that I cannot, but nevertheless feel I must, imagine, but the word that I would read without end, the single word that I would interrogate without end, that would become the beginning and the ending of so much, of who can tell how much, would first need me to find it, would need me to read every word that has been written or that might be written, so that I might be certain of it, so that I might have chosen it above all others, to be read time after time, and this is why it is the word that I can never find, that I will certainly never find, however much I look for it, however much I anticipate the moment of finding it, however much I might desire to savour it, at last, on my tongue.

I spent the afternoon in Toronto yesterday, which is not a horrible thing, so long as I do not have to drive into the city, and so long as I do not have to be anywhere in anything resembling a hurry.  I arrived on the train just before lunch, got a hair cut, and still had about five hours before I was supposed to meet Mike Hoye, and David Eaves, and Dave Humphrey for dinner.  I spent the time walking thirty blocks or so of Yonge Street, browsing six used bookstores along the way, and stopping occasionally to refill my coffee mug, which was not always as easy as you might expect, since I dislike chain coffee shops and will settle for nothing other than coffee that has been fairly traded in one way or another, and since there is apparently a lack of such coffee on Yonge Street, along with an utter absence of real bakeries, incidentally,which would in itself be sufficient reason foe me to live elsewhere.  In any case, hot black coffee and fresh buttery baked goods aside, my time in Yonge Street’s bookshops was fruitful.

I found several books:
Michael Polanyi’s The Tacit Dimension;
Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-Fe;
Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Muses;
Emmanuel Levinas’ Alterity and Transcendence;
Emmanuel Levinas’ Humanism of the Other;
Emmanuel Levinas’ Entre Nous: Thing-of-the-Other; and
Martin Heidegger’s What is Called Thinking?

I also found a few documentaries:
Alex Gibney’s Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson;
Meg McLagan and Daria Sommers’ Lioness;
Scott Galloway and Brent Pierson’s A Man Named Pearl;
Katy Chevigny’s Election Day; and
Gary Weimberg and Catherine Ryan’s Soldiers of Conscience.

Interestingly, the conversation at dinner that night, between Dave and David and Mike and I, turned largely around the function of the printed book and of the digital text as forms for creating, publishing, reading, and archiving text, and it is strange for me to think that my experience yesterday is one that my children may never share.  It is entirely possible that they will never need or want or even be able to have books in the way that I do, replacing the blocks that I walked and the shops that I browsed and the books that I purchased with a few moments of search and download on whatever digital interface has become standard for them.  I admit this possibility, and I even admit the further possibility that this shift might reflect an advance according to some measure of efficiency, but I cannot help but feel that they will have lost something beautiful.

I never blog about anything technical.  I review neither software nor hardware, neither application nor gadget.  There are good reasons for this:  Not only do I lack any education and experience with the subject, but I am also a late adopter and a selective Luddite, so almost everyone else is more qualified to write about these things than I am.  I just try to stay clear.

Today, however, I am making an exception, because today Dave Humphrey introduced me to Readability, a bookmarklet that allows users to remove the clutter, the adds, the sidebars, the themes, from any webpage, rendering the page’s text according to preferences that the reader selects.  It is one of those almost too simple ideas, and yet, for anyone who reads as much online as I do, it makes life so much easier. With a single click on any page, I can have just the text I want in a reasonable font size that runs the entire width of the screen. With a second click I can print or email it.

I have wanted this for years without even knowing what it was that I wanted, and so I am sharing it with those of you who have not yet discovered it yourselves.  I may not be qualified to write on technology, but I know what I like, and I like Readability a lot.

A friend of mine invited me over to look through some books this afternoon.  Her father, who recently passed away, was an avid collector of many things, including stamps and coins and plates and fossils and shells and rocks, but most of all books, rooms of books and rooms of books and a garage of books and a basement of books, certainly in the thousands of books.   My friend is trying to clean out the house, and she will be taking many of these books to a charity sale at some point, but she asked me and some of her other friends over to have a glass of bourbon, which was poured from one of her father’s many collectible bourbon bottles, and to take what we wanted from his book collection.

As I expected from what I knew of my friend’s father, much of the collection was not really to my taste.  There were boxes and boxes and shelves and shelves of trash war novels, cheap thrillers, biographies, science textbooks, old field guides, histories of the English royal family, and so on.  I did make a few worthwhile discoveries however.  There was a whole section of illustrators in which I found a book dedicated to the work of Howard Pyle, the artist and author that I recently discovered and enjoyed so much.  I also took from this section a number of books illustrated by Gustave Dore, who is one of my favourite artists: Perrault’s Fairy Tales; London: A Pilgrimage; Illustrations for Don Quixote; Illustrations for Rabelais; Illustrations for the Bible; Fables of La Fontaine; and The Divine Comedy.

I also found a section of books for children, all in hardcover and beautifully illustrated, from which I took Howard Pyle’s Pepper and Salt, Lewis Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, Hugh Lofting’s The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle and Doctor Dolittle’s Caravan, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Father Christmas Letters.

The rest of my finds included books by Desmond Morris, Robert A. Heinlein, Rudyard Kipling, Farley Mowat, Simone de Beauvoir, Goethe, Mark Twain, Pearl S. Buck, Norman Mailer, Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, Mordecai Richler, and E.J. Pratt, among others, an incongruous group of authors that the other book-hunters were usually more than willing to let me claim.

Of course, in any sizable collection of used books there will be at least a few of those impromptu bookmarks that so inexplicably amuse me, and this one was no exception.  I discovered two sets of drying wildflowers, left to press who knows how long ago and then forgotten, a flattened bit of cigarette foil, some torn tissue paper, a slip of notepaper with math sums on one side and a doodle on the other, a newspaper clipping about Richard Adams, “Watership Makes a Memorable Saga” by Sandra Hunter, and three newspaper clippings about Farley Mowat:  “The Perfect Writer to Plead for Great Whales” by Kildare Dobbs; “Peace on Earth, Good Will” by Gale Garnett; and “The Tragic Parable of Mowat’s Whale” by William French.

The bourbon was also good.

I almost always finish the books that I begin, but Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media has just become the latest exception.

I have written about this book in the past.  I mentioned it first in a post on database as narrative limit and then again more recently in a post on the nature of the digital object, and I have been forcing myself to read it, in fits and starts between other things, for something like a year now.  It was given to me by my friend Don Moore almost two years ago, and I made two or three ineffectual attempts to begin it before I really got started in the first place, so I feel that I have given it every opportunity to engage me.  If it has failed to do so, I can now put it aside without any damage to my conscience.

My difficulty with the book has nothing to do with its argument.  Though I do often find myself disagreeing with Manovich, I generally enjoy reading a position that challenges my own, so long as it is thoughtful and well articulated, which Manovich’s generally is.  The trouble is that his writing is utterly lacking in style and rhetorical interest.  Manovich may be intelligent, and he may be insightful, and he may offer an interestingly aesthetic approach to the question of how to understand new media, but he is an awful writer, period.  His diction is painfully deliberate.  His sentence structure is monotonous.  His tone reminds me of nothing so much as the textual equivalent of any adult who happens to talk in a Peanuts cartoon.  Every time I begin to read him I am seized by the insurmountable urge to read something, anything, else.

Perhaps the real problem, however, and I am willing to concede this in Manovich’s defense, is that I have been spoiled by the thinkers that I usually read.  To read Jacques Derrida, for example, or Emmanuel Levinas, or Jean-Luc Marion, or Roland Barthes, or Ivan Illich, to name only a few of my favourites, is to be immersed in a aesthetic experience as well as an intellectual one.  These writers attend as much to their language and to their style as they do  their content, the one reinforcing the other.  Perhaps it is only their virtuosity that has made Manovich so unendurable to me.  I will admit the possibility.  Even so, I am finished with Manovich.

I am interested, not in devotional art, but in art as devotion, not in the artistic object made to be a site of devotion for its creator or for its receiver, but in the artistic practise that, with the proper spirit, becomes a discipline of the mind and of the body and of the spirit that allows devotion, perhaps, to occur in us.  In an artistic practise of this kind, the object of art, far from becoming an idol, never even becomes an icon, because the iconic function is played by the artistic practise itself.  It is a practise of art in which the artistic object and even the artistic act become radically secondary to an artistic discipline that seeks to be, before all else a devotion, though it knows that true devotion must always lie beyond it.  I would have my reading and my writing become this kind of discipline, this kind of devotion.

As should be clear by now, the space of the home is a subject that is of great concern for me, so I was sincerely pleased to learn that my friend, whom some of you will know as TC from her comments on this site, has begun a blog of short quotations and photos and reflections on the meaning of home.  TC’s comments have often caused me to think differently and more deeply through the idea of home over the past two years or so, and two of her book recommendations, George Perec’s Species of Spaces and Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, have become a significant part of my personal canon, so I will enjoy the opportunity to read her in the coming months, and I think many of you will as well.

I have only just begun reading Ivan Illich’s In the Vineyard of the Text, and already I have the need to write about it.  This does not bode well for any of you who might be following along with me.  You might have to prepare for a steady diet of Illich’s reflection on the Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor over the next few weeks.  I apologize in advance, sincerely.

In his introduction to the book, Illich says, “No one should be misled into taking my footnotes as either proof of, or invitation to, scholarship.  They are there to remind the reader of the rich harvest of memorabilia – rocks, fauna, and flora – which a man has picked up on repeated walks through a certain area, and now would like to share with others.  They are here mainly to encourage the reader to venture into the shelves of the library and experiment with distinct types of reading.”

I love this passage for several reasons.

First, I think that the image of walking along the path and collecting the things that are found there is an apt image for the kind of scholarship that I value.  The walker is not interested in cataloging the flora and fauna of the path exhaustively, nor in classifying them rigorously.  The walker is interested in becoming familiar with the area, with the things that are there every day, with the things that are only rarely there, with the things that make this path singular.  The walker is looking and seeing, is listening and hearing, is finding and gathering, and is also, most significantly, sharing with others what has been found.

The kind of scholarship that Illich is describing with this image proceeds with a similar gait and a similar pace.  It is an invitation to walk with someone who has read and thought and written on certain intellectual paths, with someone who can point to the things that are there to be seen and heard and found.  It does not ask that I replicate a set of results.  It asks that I follow the path that another has made familiar so that it can become familiar to me also.  This is exactly the kind of scholarship that I want to model.

Second, by applying this idea of scholarship to his footnotes, Illich causes me to read his footnotes differently.  They cease being justifications for his scholarly claims and become recommendations for the books and writers and ideas that he has found and loved.  They become the textual equivalent of a verbal phenomenon that is familiar to anyone who talks with others about books and writers.  They say, “Oh, by the way, while we’re on the topic, such and such a book talks about this idea in interesting ways,” or they say, “I remember author so and so said something that relates to this point.”  In other words, they are all the places that our conversation could have gone but did not, all the things that it brushed against and took into itself but did not dwell upon.  They are all the places where our conversation might go next, when we meet again.

Third, Illich’s image is also an encouragement for his readers not to stop at his text, but to read through it to those that he has read himself, to go into the libraries and find the books that he is recommending, to read these things for ourselves.  It is never sufficient, he implies to read about another book or writer, however valuable such reading may be.  It is always necessary to read further and more, to read the many other books that one book always recommends,  even if this process will never be complete, perhaps because it will never be complete.  To read through the book in this way is to take the footnotes as recommendations to more and further reading, as possibilities, as conversations to come.

Illich takes himself at his own word in this respect, as he always does.  The footnotes of In the Vineyard of the Text are often very long, comprising more than half the page in many instances, and they could easily be passed over as either too boring or too intimidating to merit the time and effort that reading them would take, but his footnotes are as different as he claims they are, or perhaps I come to read them differently just because he has made such a claim.  I find them often conversational in tone, unafraid to reference an almost irrelevant anecdote or to recommend a particular book with a kind of personal fervour, and I sometimes find myself reflecting on them as much as the text itself.  Most interestingly, they also make me wonder what other textual conventions might be used in this way, against themselves, in order to foster a reading that is more open and more convivial.

I had a chance to go by the EBC library today and search through the discards.  I was doing so primarily to make a point to my class that it is possible to find good books just about anywhere, but my visit proved much more productive than I expected.  I found a number of books that were interesting but for which I was not necessarily looking, the sort of books I thought I would find:

D. Mackenzie Brown – Ultimate Concern: Tillich in Dialogue
Friedrich Schleiermacher – On Religion
R. J. Kaufmann, editor – G. B. Shaw: A Collection of Critical Essays
Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus – The Lives of the Twelve Caesars
Frederick Buechner – The Sacred Journey
Martis Esslin, editor - Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays
Hugh Kenner - Samuel Beckett
Sigmund Freud – Totem and Taboo

More excitingly, I also found a novel by one of my favourite and most elusive authors: Many Dimensions by Charles Williams.  I have written at length about Charles Williams before, so I will not do so again.  I will just say that I love his books and was disappointed to find, when I got home, that Many Dimensions is one I already own. On the other hand, simply discovering it among the discards, so unexpectedly, was a profound delight, and I will now have something to give Dave Humphrey when we meet on Wednesday night.