From Word To Word

If I have in some of my posts given the impression that I am in any way an accomplished gardener, let this post serve to dispel it.  While I can recall our family having a vegetable garden when I was very young, gardening was not something that my family did.  When I moved out, I lived solely in apartments that had no dirt at all and then in a little bungalow that had a garden fairly well begun before I even I arrived.  It is only in the past year, since we moved into our new place, that I have had a substantial amount of space to garden and the growing desire to do something with it.  Though I do love to garden, though I do want to become a better gardener, I am, at the moment, almost completely incompetent.

For example, I wrote a month or so ago that I was trying to grow sancherry bushes from seed.  Having no idea how to go about this properly, I did what I usually do.  I made a completely uninformed attempt to do things on my own, planted the seeds immediately and without any preparation, waited impatiently for them to sprout, and was horribly disappointed when they did nothing of the sort.  I could have researched the process online, of course, and there are probably many books available at my local library just down the street, but I have a fundamental antipathy to the usual kind of approach to instructional material.  They are either impersonal and dull in the extreme, or they are personal and insipid in the extreme.  I have encountered only very few exceptions, and I treasure them very highly.

Fortuitously, I have just discovered a book is such an exception, one that serves both my purposes and my tastes entirely. My mother happened to leave it on the dining room table, a book called Growing Trees from Seed, by a man named Henry Kock, who was an Interpretive Horticulturalist at the University of Guelph’s Arboretum and the founder of the Elm Recovery Project.  My mother, who worked with him at the arboretum, describes him as probably the most amazing man she has ever met, and his book is equally remarkable.

Its appeal is not in the information it provides, though it covers its subject exhaustively.  Its appeal is in the way that he tells the story of growing trees from seed precisely as a story.  There are some writers who introduce anecdotes in order to make a text less dull, but often in ways that seem forced and unnatural.  Kock’s anecdotes are less an insertion into a broader textual structure than they are the structure itself.  He writes as if he is sitting with his reader in the garden, pointing out this or the other detail of a specimen, demonstrating a particular technique, or relating the story of when he first saw a certain variety of tree.  He does not lecture on the subject of trees.  He narrates a passion for them, a life of dedication to them.

This sense of being alongside Kock as he works in the nursery makes the book much more than a reference volume.  While it would certainly serve this purpose, it deserves to be read whole, quite apart from any immediate need for the information it conveys.  It deserves to be read with the spirit that it was written, with a passion for seeing native plants conserved and reintroduced in their former habitats, with a passion that never fails to see something mystical in a tree emerging from a seed, with a passion that understand planting native species as “a nearly sacred act.”  It is written by someone who knew how to honour the uniqueness of his immediate environment, and he inspires his readers to discover how to honour in this way also.

I just recently read a summary of Wendy Chun’s book Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics, and she confirms an argument that I made several weeks ago, that the web is not actually a space at all and is misrepresented by the spatial metaphors that we use to describe it.  She says essentially that a term like ‘cyberspace’ offers only “a metaphor and a mirage, because cyberspace is not spatial,” and she shows how these metaphors have nevertheless become the basis, nor only of everyday language about the web, but also of regulatory legislation for the web, which perhaps explains why this regulation is often constructed so ineffectively.

At the time when I first suggested that the language of spatiality was inappropriate to the web, I saw the implications of this argument primarily in relation to the possibility of being at home on the web.  However, Chun’s recognition of the legal implications of this language has prompted me to think a little more broadly about the effects of misunderstanding the web as a space.

1.  As I have already argued elsewhere, it encourages an inaccurate conception of how we inhabit or make ourselves at home there.

2.  As Chun indicates, it becomes enshrined in the language of the legal system, and this contributes to the difficulty of developing useful and effective laws to govern the web.

3.  It conceals the real physical structure of the web.

4.  It conceals the fact that the web itself is product and that to use it is in fact a consumption, even if this consumption appears as a kind of participation in production.

5.  It promotes the illusion of mobility and activity through the web, concealing how the web essentially immobilizes its users in front of a monitor, even and especially if that monitor is mobile.

6.  It constructs the web as an alternative to the physical world rather than as an extension of it.

I recognize that this list is probably very partial, but I think that it should go some ways to indicating the effects of a language of spatiality being misapplied to the web.  Our whole social conception of the web is at stake in these kinds of metaphors, and it is necessary that we begin to adopt a language about the web that is more aware of its real physical and social structures.

Though I am perhaps biased because of my own academic background, I might suggest that more appropriate metaphors for the web might be found in the figures of reading and writing.  Not only do these concepts reflect much of the activity that is actually conducted through the web, and not only are they used to perform this function in varying degrees already.  They also have the connotations of production and consumption, of a physical and localized structure of communication, and of the immobility imposed by a medium on its consumer.  Might these textual metaphors also permit a more effective legislation of the web?  Might they encourage a more critical and interpretive approach to the web?  I am interested to know what others might think about these possibilities.

A lie is never a lie if it makes the story better, if it makes the story more what it already is, if it makes the story truer to itself.  To insist that a story be slavishly consistent with reality, even and especially when the story pretends to be a true story, is most often to insist that it be a bad story, that it be untrue to itself precisely as a story. A story, in every case, is already a misrepresentation and a falsification, omitting and translating and transforming and recreating.  This does not make the story a lie.  It makes the story a story.  In the story, a lie is a lie, not when it is inconsistent with reality, but only when it is inconsistent with the story, when it does not reflect the nature and the purpose of the story.  There is no other lie, not to the story, and there is nothing that is not a story.

One of my friends, who prefers on principle to remain anonymous to the web, asked me yesterday about how exactly I go about writing for the web.  She is, and I hope this does not threaten her anonymity too much to say so, a teacher of writing and composition, and she is interested to know how it is that writing in the mode of a blog, or in other web modes, differs from more traditional writing practises.  She claims that writing for the web can be paralleled most closely to the tradition of the personal essay, a form that is strongly connected to print journalism in various forms, and her hypothesis is that it may be productive to compare the writing style of print journalism at the height of its influence with the writing styles emerging in new media journalism today.

I am not sure if my responses helped her very much, but our conversation did cause me to spend some time thinking about the process through which I come to write in this space.  What I realized is that writing for the web, at least my writing for the web, may indeed resemble the personal essay in function and even at times in form, but that it is a mode of personal essay that intensifies the personal to extremes that would rarely have been possible in print journalism.  This is the case even in my own writing, and I am someone who consciously limits the amount and the nature of the personal information that I include.  It is this intensification of the personal, this intensification of personality, that I think is a key marker of writing for the web, so I though that I might explore the reasons why my own personality has accorded so well with tthis mode of writing.

What I realized, in effect, is that I enjoy the nature of writing for the web because I am not a focussed thinker.  I never have been.  This was true even when I was under the duress of having to perform in the academic institution.  It is still truer now that I have little external direction for what I need to think and read and write.  At any given time, I am thinking through several problems having to do with a whole range of activities, from gardening to teaching to philosophy to whatever.  A short list at the moment, for example, would include the following questions, some of which will very likely provide the source for future writing in this space or elsewhere:

1.  What is the nature of home on the web?  What does it mean to be at home in virtual spaces?

2.  How exactly might I create a physical barrier around the corner of my yard that would protect the garden that I want to plant without blocking the view of the house?  Might it be possible to do this in a way that would integrate the barrier into the garden in a productive way?

3.  How might it be possible to encourage spiritual community in the home or the neighbourhood as a way of contesting and resisting the homogenizing influence of church institution?  Can something like this be conceived that would not immediately become a church institution by another name?

4.  What are the ways that I might pattern a reading practise to my students that would model an appreciation for the classic literature that we are studying precisely in terms of reading contemporary culture?  How do I contextualize this kind of reading historically?  How to I represent its significance personally?

5.  How will I schedule this fall’s canning around our new household rhythms?  When might I pick and prepare and cook without interfering with with my Mother-in-law’s physiotherapy practise, with my increasingly napless children, with my family time, and with my activities outside of the home?

This is only a very partial list, but it gives a sense, I hope, of the unfocused nature of my thinking, which is directly related to the unfocused nature of my living.  I am interested in many things, so I think about many things.  I do not have, not in sufficient quantities, the capacity for the kind of sustained and focused writing that is required in traditional academic work.  I recognize this and am not terribly disappointed by it.  What I need is a mode of writing that enables me to write on the various things that interest me, but in a way that also enables me to return to these things, as I will, building a broad and integrated writing and thinking rather than a narrow and isolated writing and thinking.

My process of writing for the web, therefore, as I said to my friend yesterday evening, is not very different from my natural and personal process of living and thinking and being.  What I write is personal in this sense, though it does not always take the form of the essay or always include personal content.  It appears best on the web because the web enables precisely this kind of personal writing, this kind of personalization.  While there may some similarities between current writers of the web and the old personal essayists, therefore, the very personalization that the web allows, and the variation that this personalization allows in turn, will mean that there will also be a great number of dissimilarities.  The web does permit and encourage writing in the mode of the personal essay, but it also permits and encourages writing in very different modes, because it is open to the personal and the idiosyncratic.  This may be, in my opinion, one of the web’s greatest strengths.  It is certainly one of its greatest attractions to me.

Some time ago, during one of those conversations that I have wanted to relate here but not had the time, Dave Humphrey and I were reflecting on the parallels between the rise of written text and the rise of electronic text.

Written text. of course, was not always as useful a thing as it is today.  The first alphabetical writing was just a series of letters without any of the textual apparatus that we now take for granted.  There were no spaces between words, no paragraphing, no punctuation.  There were certainly no tables of contents, no indices, no appendices, no footnotes, no annotations.  Without this textual apparatus, reading was an activity for the initiated only.  It took considerable skill and practice to decode written text.  One of the proofs that was given as evidence for the brilliance of Julius Caesar was that he could read without speaking aloud, a technique used by most ancient Roman readers so that they would have audio clues to assist their reading.  Without the textual apparatus that makes reading so natural for most people today, written text remained little more than raw, incomprehensible data.

There are analogies here to the web.  Though the individual parts of the web are readable to most users as text or video or audio, the web as a whole remains largely a mass of raw, incomprehensible data. There are, of course, a number of textual structures that already attempt to provide an apparatus for reading the web.  The search engine is by far the most powerful of these, replacing the static printed index with a flexible generated one.  There are also smaller scale tools that enable me to search the text of a site.  There are tags that let me organize information in databases.  There are bookmarks for the websites I visit.  There are RSS feeds for blogs that I read.  All of these tools make the web more readable.  Without them I would be reduced to the modern equivalent of the ancient Romans, reading aloud, sounding out each word, trying to make sense of what would be little more than a mass of data.

Even with these tools, however, there is much of the internet that we are reading aloud, so to speak, because we still lack the conventions that would make it seem natural to us.  The most recent wave of innovations, mostly having to do with social media and user driven content, has only exacerbated this problem, producing ever greater amounts of data at ever increasing speeds.  Even assuming that most of it is not worth reading, an amply justified assumption in my opinion, it still remains that I need to find and read and connect those bits of the web that really are worth reading, and there is a need for innovative tools that will allow this sort of reading.  There is a need, in short, for a more sophisticated textual apparatus for the web.

I have already mentioned some of what I would like to see myself: programs to manage the content I encounter and ways to map and share the paths that I make as I find my way through the web.  Lev Manovich, in an interview that I will discuss at some later time, talks about mapping cultural flows through the web.  Whatever conventions the web adopts and adapts as it grows, it is these tools that will enable it to be experienced less as a stream of data and more as a comfortable text.  It is these tools on which the usefulness of the web will rely, and we need to be conscious of their significance as we develop them.

Several months ago, just before I began writing this pseudo-blog, I began experimenting with the wiki format on my courseware website. I wanted to see what writing through that medium would look like, with all of my writing, even abandoned drafts and nonsense pieces, in one place, linked loosely to one another, changing and adapting as I worked with them. It was my hypothesis that this kind of format would allow the different genres, styles, degrees of completion, and individual purposes of my writing to inform each other more fully, so that I might have a better sense of my own practise, my own strengths and weaknesses. I was also hopeful that the ability of the wiki to keep old versions would give me an understanding of my process.

The experiment seemed initially successful. I posted a small number of selections from as wide a variety of my writing as a could, choosing pieces that were short and could be incorporated quickly. I began to link between them in a tentative way, trying to get a sense of what sorts of links would be useful to me as the wiki grew. This initial success continued even once I began writing in the blog format, when I began dumping selected posts into the wiki as well. However, as soon as I began to try and write new material through the wiki, I began to encounter some difficulties.

The very functions that I thought would enable me to understand my writing better actively distracted me when I came to the actual task of writing. I felt overly conscious of the versions of what I was writing, because they too would be available for others to browse, would become part of the work, like a palimpsest, but many layers deep. I also found myself concerned by the kinds of connections that a piece should have to the other texts on the wiki, since it quickly became clear that these too would become part of its literary structure. By making these allusions formal, by forcibly directing them to the readers’ attention, I was privileging them in ways that made me uncertain. It was not that I felt that it was wrong to determine these elements, because writing is always precisely this kind of determination, but I was so unfamiliar with this kind of writing that I was unable to make these choices in an informed way. In short, I spent more time thinking about how the medium was forcing itself onto the writing than I did doing the actual writing.

While these more or less theoretical distractions were certainly interesting, and I do plan to return to some of them in greater detail, I was not getting any writing accomplished. I found that I was drifting back to my old practises just so that I could progress, and I stopped using the wiki at all except to remove spam edits and make an occasional blog update. In any sense related to my writing and thinking it became almost entirely useless. So, I have decided to let the wiki die. I will not delete it entirely, because a fair amount of time and and work went into its creation, and I have learned by too frequent experience that what seems like garbage in the present sometimes finds a purpose for itself in the future. I am, however, putting it into storage, as it were, and I have no immediate plans for it.

Even so, I am more convinced than ever that wiki tools are capable of producing some interesting intellectual and artistic effects in writing. Though I found the medium to be difficult in some ways, and though I do not have the time or the energy to persevere through this difficulty at the moment, there is an opportunity there to do something that is at least novel and perhaps even useful, if any one is so inclined.

I am constantly living in the shadow of the desire to write, the desire for writing. Whatever else I do, I do it under the influence of this desire. It is not necessarily a desire to write well, though I desire this too. It is not necessarily a desire for writing in a certain medium, though I have my preferences in this regard. It is a desire simply to write myself as such, on the page, on the conversation, on the landscape, on the palate.

The desire for writing is not simply the desire to preserve a trace of myself through the things that I mark. If this were the whole of it, I would not choose to write so often in ways that are so ephemeral, in planting, in cooking, in speaking.  The desire for writing is less a desire to preserve myself into the future than it is a desire to realize myself more fully in the present.  It is the desire to be more fully.

As I mentioned in my post on Malcom Lowry’s Under the Volcano, one of the things that I like most about this book is a single sentence, which I think may be the most exceptional sentence ever written in the English language. I did not have the space to quote it in that post, but I feel so strongly about it that I will quote it here, where it can stand apart in its own right:

“It is a light blue moonless summer evening, but late, perhaps ten o’clock, with Venus burning hard in daylight, so we are certainly somewhere far north, and standing on this balcony, when from beyond along the coast comes the gathering thunder of a long many-engineered freight train, thunder because though we are separated by this wide strip of water from it, the train is rolling eastward and the changing wind veers for a moment from an easterly quarter, and we face east, like Swedenborg’s angels, under a sky clear save where far to the northeast over distant mountains whose purple has faded lies a mass of almost pure white clouds, suddenly, as by a light in an alabaster lamp, illumined from within by gold lightening, yet you can hear no thunder, only the roar of the great train with its engines and its wide shunting echoes as it advances from the hills into the mountains: and then all at once a fishing boat with tall gear comes running round the point like a white giraffe, very swift and stately, leaving directly behind it a long silver scalloped rim of wake, not visibly moving inshore, but now stealing ponderously beachward toward us, this scrolled silver rim of wash striking the shore first in the distance, then spreading all along the curve of the beach, while the floats, for these are timber driving floats, are swayed together, everything jostled and beautifully ruffled and stirred and tormented in this rolling sleeked silver, then little by little calm again, and you see the reflection of the remote white thunderclouds in the water, and now the lightening within the white clouds in deep water, as the fishing boat itself with a golden scroll of travelling light in its silver wake beside it reflected from the cabin vanishes round the headland, silence, and then again, within the white white distant alabaster thunderclouds beyond the mountains, the thunderless gold lightening in the blue evening, unearthly.”

This needs to be read several times, aloud, slowly, accounting for the punctuation, like poetry.

In Dave Humphrey’s comment on Depth, Frequency, and Promiscuity, he suggests that the idea of rigour is often related to a certain professionalism, and he opposes to this professional rigour a kind of amateur irresponsibility in the use of “texts, and theories, and ingredients.” I am in substantial agreement with this idea, though I would suggest that there are responsibilities that I owe even and especially as an amateur in the sense that he is describing.

To the extent that an amateur irresponsibility is one that refuses to make itself responsible to an institution, or a discipline, or mode of publication, or an editor, or an anonymous reading public, to this extent, I affirm the amateurism that Dave is advocating. What I want, and what the web permits, is a writing and a publishing that escapes precisely these responsibilities. Irresponsibility of this kind comes at a cost to me, certainly, but the cost purchases a freedom to be responsible in other ways, in ways that are far more significant to me.

These other responsibilities arise, not in connection to an institution or a profession, but in relation to people and to the texts they share. I want always to have done what I can to make myself responsible to the friends with whom I am in conversation, to the authors and texts that I am reading, and to the texts that I am writing. I want always to have been rigorous in these relations, not out of a professionalism, but out of a sincere respect. I want always to have done what is proper in these relations, not out of a social expectation, but out of a sincere love. This kind of responsibility is the only reason that I write at all, and I want never to have been irresponsible in this sense, not to any extent, though I will always have failed in this responsibility to one extent or another, even now.

Commenting on my recent post, Some Reflections on the Medium, Dave Humphrey suggests that perhaps writing for the web has caused me to trade depth for frequency, though I think and hope that he does not intend this as a criticism. He describes this less deep and more frequent writing as promiscuous, an adjective I often use to describe the way that I read many kinds of text at once without any predetermined program, merely pulling books from my shelf as they surprise my interest. I am interested in these three adjectives, one implied, two explicit: shallow, or at least less deep; frequent; and promiscuous.

I have tended to avoid the metaphor of depth in describing my own writing, mostly because it entails for me an ideal that I do not find appropriate to every situation. Instead, I most often speak of rigour, which implies a metaphor of labour, where the rigorous one is the one who does the work that is required or expected of the job, or I speak of propriety, which implies a metaphor of social relation, where the proper one is the one who does what is required or expected of the relationship. Both of these metaphors appeal to me more because they recognize that depth is not always what is required, that at certain times it fulfils the demands of rigour and propriety to be relatively shallow. By returning me to the metaphor of depth, however, with which I am still uncomfortable, Dave makes unavoidable the fact that writing for the web, at least in this particular mode, has indeed forced me into a relative shallowness. It has limited the number of subjects that I can take up with propriety and rigour. It has forced me to take up improperly and unrigorously subjects that required a depth that I was unable to give them. To this extent, I accept and am troubled by Dave’s use of this word.

I accept with much less reservation his idea of frequency. Not only does it describe accurately how the web enables a much more frequent and therefore open mode of publishing than does the traditional publishing industry, but it bears connotations of the sound or energy wave, which I think are particularly apt. In order for a sound wave to be sent and received, it must be modulated to the proper frequency, and it here that the idea of propriety returns. What the web offers in return for an impropriety of depth, it returns here as a propriety of frequency. I am able to write at the proper speed and with the proper rhythm, with the proper frequency, so that I can hear and be heard. I am intrigued by this idea, and I may return to it as I have more opportunity to reflect on its implications.

Dave’s last suggestion, that my writing for the web is promiscuous in the way that my reading is promiscuous, relates to this idea of frequency also. If what I read is not programmatic, though at times it has this element, and if the films that I watch and the conversations that I conduct and the activities that I perform are similarly without curriculum, if they are promiscuous in this sense, then it is perhaps only proper that my writing be promiscuous also. Perhaps it is precisely in this respect that the web offers me a frequency that is proper to me. Perhaps the rhythm of my reading and my thinking and my life can be best described by this idea of promiscuity. I may need to return to this possibility also.