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.

Last year I wrote what I called a State of the Blog Address quite close to the anniversary of my first post on April 11th, 2008.  This year, as you will see if you check today’s date very closely, I am a little late to mark the anniversary, and this is mostly because I forgot about it until now, and I would not likely have remembered it at all had Dave Humphrey not emailed to tell me that he has extended our vocamus.net domain for another three years and to remark that I will now need to keep blogging at least that much longer.

This gave me pause for thought.  I had told myself when I started writing this blog that I would commit to it for at least a year, and I publicly committed myself to a second year in my first State of the Blog Address, but I had never looked any further ahead than a year at a time, and the idea that I might be writing in this way for three more years was, I admit, a little daunting.

This is not to say that I am less interested now in writing through this form.  I still find it a very useful medium for me, allowing me to formulate ideas in the limited time that my life as a father and a husband and a teacher and a gardener and a cook permits me, and allowing me to share these ideas with the people who are important to me.  For these and other reasons I have every intention of continuing to write through this blog for at least the next year or so, though what I write through it will likely change as much during that time as it has changed over the past year or more.  Even so, the idea of comitting to three years of writing in any particular form is perhaps a little more than I am willing to entertain.  It is certainly possible that I will still be writing a blog in ten years.  It is also possible that my life or the world or both will have changed so much even in the next year that I will need a very different form to accommodate what I would like to write.

So, the domain has been renewed for three more years, but I will commit to nothing more than to be here to write a State of the Blog Address next year, which will have to be enough for all of you, since it is more than enough for me.

Words are like stones.  You must work with them.  You must heft them, turn them in your hands, feel their weight and their shape, know each one for what it is before you can find its proper place, not its perfect place, for no stone and no word ever fits perfectly, and each word and each stone must be held in place by other stones and words, by earth or by mortar, but each will have its proper place, a place that fits it, a place for which it might have been fitted if it had been fitted, though it has not been fitted for any place at all, and what these words and these stones become is precisely this, a proper place that is the sum of their proper places, where they come to be something that they always could have come to be, one of the many things that they could have come to be, and perhaps, oh, let us rest in this perhaps, they will come to be something beautiful.  This is the work of the mason and the writer, both.  It is what makes words like stones.

I have always wanted to invoke a muse, any muse really, although I hold a special fondness for Calliope and Melpomene and even, to a lesser but still substantial degree, Polyhymnia. The trouble is that there is relatively little demand (current literary fashion being what it is) for invocations to anyone, and there are tragically few readers (current educational standards being a little worse even than current literary fashion) who would recognize an invocation even if I were to write one.

Fortunately, I have never been easily dissuaded from an idea once I have made it my own (usually by theft, original ideas being increasingly difficult to come upon), and so I have determined to write an invocation here for no very good reason except that I want very much to write one.  Even if everything else I write is worthless, let it only be said that my invocation was wonderfully accomplished, and I will consider myself satisfied.

So, I strongly admonish anyone with so little to do with their time that they can spend it critiquing what I write: refrain from criticizing this invocation entirely unless you are prepared to do so in the most laudatory fashion. I leave you the rest of my writing for you to tear between yourselves beneath the table, and if you object that my current metaphor casts you as dogs, at least be thankful that you are well fed, because I have given you the meal almost whole and kept only the smallest scrap for myself.

An Invocation for a Blog
Come sweetest three of sisters nine
And grant your ancient dignities
To this still adolescent art,
That it might learn maturity
By speaking with your wiser tongue,
And you might find your youth return
By walking in its firmer step,
And we might make a unison
That knows the best of youth and age.

Now, there you have what may be the world’s first invocation on behalf of a blog, though I am certain that it will not be the last, not with the shining example that I have just set for the world.  This invocation will probably mark the beginning of a new era in the literature of the web, a new movement to integrate the traditions of the past with the media of the future.

Of course, I have been wrong before.

Dave Humphrey gave me a book a month or so ago, a collection of pages really, a printout of a pdf  document.  It was a novel, written by Robin Sloan and entitled Annabel Scheme.  Dave passed the book to me, he said, because it had been published in an interesting way, where the author had solicited people, a posse of patrons as he calls them, to sponsor the project in return for a copy of the book when it was completed.  This idea intrigued me, and I put the pile of pages on my desk to await a more or less quiet afternoon, which finally happened yesterday.

Sloan describes the novel as “Sherlock Holmes for the 21st century”, but I am not sure this accurately describes the sense of the book for me.  It feels like a less drug-induced Philip K. Dick mashed with a more tech-savy Douglas Adams and a more playful William Gibson, all writing of a world with demon-possessed computers and ghosts using electric lines as an internet to haunt the living.  The paranormal is mixed liberally with the technological, and both are infused with a mischievous and affectionate satire of google, hard-boiled detective novels, start-up culture, urban ghost stories, and sundry other things.  It may not be great literature, but it is certainly good entertainment.

The story moves quickly and directly with a minimum of description and introspection.  In some places it reads almost like a more fully realized film script rather than a novel, but this feels like a strength rather than a fault because the tone and the narrative arc proceed in similarly easy ways.  The accomplishment of the novel, I think, is that it can move at this pace and still comment interestingly on the almost mystical ways that our culture relates to its technology.  It manages both to be an entertainment and a playful reflection on the gods and the ghosts in our machines.

All this is encouraging to me, because it is an example of  an alternative publishing model that has been largely successful in achieving its admittedly limited goals.  Though the model is still unable to provide a sufficient living for the author, it is perhaps a movement in that direction as it reimagines patronage apart from wealthy benefactors or corporate sponsors or government grants, where people can come together to support the kind of writing and music and art that is most meaningful to them.  I am interested to see if Sloan, or someone else for that matter, will be able to push the model further, to make the posse of patrons a means through which our increasingly virtual communities are able to choose and support adequately the artists that will define and represent them.

Dave Humphrey posted on the subject of grammar the other day, arguing against the now cliche assumption that new textual media like texting, instant messaging, twitter, facebook, and blogs are creating a generation of students who are poor writers.  Now, as a teacher of English Literature, I have been confronted by some horrible writing over the years, and very little of the writing that I see is of the quality that I would like it to be, but this does not imply an easy correlation between new media and poor writing.

In my opinion, the shift in writing has not been from good writing to bad writing at all, but from technically correct writing to technically incorrect writing, which are related but not identical questions.  Though good writers generally do have a certain facility with the technical aspects of writing, it is certainly possible, as the schoolwork of previous generations would testify, to write correctly, by dint of rote and repetition, but still to write poorly, without style, without rhetorical force, without intellectual or emotional insight, without sensitivity to the subtleties of sound and connotation and allusion.  It is entirely possible, therefore, even likely, that previous generations of students were no better writers than the students of our own day, even if they were better able to write correctly according to a certain definition that may or not be very useful in any case. I am certainly not suggesting that today’s students are better writers  than their predecessors, because they may in fact be worse on the whole.  I am only suggesting that it is not possible to measure writing ability solely by the degree of adherence to certain technical standards.

With this distinction in mind, I would argue that new textual media do in fact have a relationship with the ability of students to write in ways that are technically correct.  It is not that these media have produced an increase in incorrectness, in colloquialism and informality, but that they have made our already colloquial and informal communication a textual and public activity rather than an oral and more or less private one.  We now write to one another the things that we previously only said to one another, and this has produced a new kind of writing that tries to represent textually the kinds of colloquial talk that has never before found a significant place in formal writing.  This new colloquial writing is not merely a corruption of more traditional formal modes of writing.  It is a mode of writing unto itself, with its own grammars and technicalities.  It is not necessarily good, of course, but that is not exactly the point.  After all, the colloquial talk that is now being made textual through new media writing was not often of tremendous value either.

This textualization of our colloquial talk is significant, however, because it begins to blur the boundary between the colloquial and the formal.  If there was once a strong distinction between the ways that people spoke and the ways that they wrote, a strong distinction between colloquial speech and formal writing, this distinction is now increasingly obscured as both the colloquial and the formal become a matter of textuality.  After all, people now text gossip to each other and blog their lives to each other and write their school assignments or professional documents all at the same time and on the same device.  These activities are just different windows in the virtual space of the same monitor.  There is no longer a strong spacial or temporal separation between formal and informal communication, so it should come as no surprise that the two begin to bleed into one another.

Not only do new textual media blur the distinction between formal and informal writing, however, they also blur the distinction between textuality and other forms of media, as text becomes only one of many elements that are combined in the space of the screen in order to communicate, something to be combined with emoticons and embedded audio-visual material and hyperlinks and other such media.  Though this is not exactly new, as even the earliest written texts have incorporated illustrations, what is new is that these additional media are no longer intended only to support or to enhance or to explicate the text.  Instead, they are now understood as having equivalent or even greater significance than the text, where the primary medium is audio or visual, and the text is included merely as a caption or a label.

It is the blurring of these two distinctions, between the colloquial and the formal and between textuality and other media, that I think is the real source of anxiety for most educators, even if they have not yet recognized it.  What they perceive as a degradation in their students’ ability to write properly is in actuality a shift in the very idea of what constitutes proper writing and even a shift in what constitutes the proper role of writing.  They advocate a return to rote grammar and spelling in the schools without realizing that writing well in the context of new media may well require very different kinds of propriety altogether, very different approaches to rhetoric and persuasion, very different understandings of style and tone.

Now, let me be as clear as I can.  I am very definitely not suggesting that the writing going on through new media is good writing simply because it writes in new and different ways.  My experience with most new media writing is that, when it is intended still to be the primary mode of communication, it is as horrible as most writing has always been, and when it is being subordinated to other kinds of media, it is usually a good deal worse.  Simple novelty of form and purpose should not at all obscure the fact that this kind of writing is mostly characterized by cliche, incoherence, and general sloppiness, but this is not merely an effect of adopting one standard of technical propriety over another.  It is an effect of having few models of good writing within the newly adopted standards of technical propriety, models that teachers and schools are too fixated on grammar to provide.

Let me take emoticons as an example. I have no essential objections to emoticons, neither in themselves nor as an example of visual elements being introduced to a textual medium.  My objection to emoticons is that they are usually the visual equivalent of a textual cliche.  They say only very little, and they say it in only a very simplistic way, which makes them suitable for only certain kinds of writing, for those kinds of writing that are the equivalents of our colloquial speech, which often do not require anything more than simple and uncomplicated modes of expression.  Rather than just objecting to all such visual elements in a text, however, I would suggest that teachers should be providing models that combine visual elements with written text more effectively, models that signal a more formal or thoughtful use of these visual elements without necessarily making recourse to traditional writing conventions.

They could, for example, show how a still primarily textual piece might include audio or video or photographs or hyperlinks to material that explicates its subject more effectively than words could alone.  They could show how text might be superimposed as commentary on a video or on a series of photographs or on an electronic text in order to make a close reading of these media.  They could show how text might be voiced, or combined with music, or laid over visuals in order to produce a certain stylistic or tonal quality.  In short, they could address emoticons, not as a failure to understand formal grammar, but as a failure to understand the visual possibilities of which emoticons are only the most banal example.

This does not devalue the role of formal grammar.  Many of our grammatical conventions exist because they help us to communicate more clearly and more easily.  They are not essential, to be sure, and they can and should change over time, but that does not alter the fact that they are useful as conventions of communication.  What I am suggesting is merely that the value of these conventions needs to be modeled in the context of writing that is relevant to students because it also models the ways in which their media enables them to write.  I am suggesting that we need to write new media well, to encourage others to write it well, and to learn from others who are writing it well, and I am suggesting that this requires us to discover and develop and artculate and share new conventions that will enable this kind of writing, even if these new conventions take some of what they need from good old fashioned grammar.

My friend Lauren Anderson has just posted about finding an old binder full of her juvenile writing, some of which she was brave enough to share, and it made me reflect on how much of this kind of writing there must be, lying in the neglected folders and binders and boxes of even the most accomplished writers.  I found myself wondering what might happen if everyone were brave enough to share this kind of thing with each other, whether this might not encourage people to see writing and writers a little differently, a little more accurately, a little more humanly,  and so I thought that I might also share some of my own highschool writing as a beginning to that end.

Now, my juvenile writing is certainly as horrible as Lauren’s, but it is horrible for all different reasons.  Mine is horrible because I was reading far too much Coleridge and Wordsworth and Keats and Shelley and Shakespearean romance, and because I desperately wanted to be a Romantic poet, more than anything, which produced poetry of only the most painfully maudlin sort.  Let me give an example from a poem called “The Prayer of Sir Gawain”.  I am particularly fond of the affected archaisms and the constantly inverted, yoda-like, sentence structure:

A solemn vow to Knight of Green
I made before my King and Queen
That, if my stroke did fail to part
His mighty head and stop his heart,
Then when a year and day had gone
Should I my fullest armor don
And ride from Camelot away
To where that Knight doth hold his sway.
So reaching that unwelcome place
There give myself unto his grace.

So now I kneel ‘neath awesome fear
As quick the payment stroke draws near.
My mind does see the chapel there
That fearsome Knight’s most dreadful lair.
And in his hands an axe of steel
which on my neck I soon shall feel.
I see that helmless head before
My eyes, and here his roar
Forever ringing in my ears,
Forever playing on my fears.

Unfortunately, the melodrama of Sir Gawain seems almost restrained in comparison to these lines from the fabulously titled “I Hamlet Unto Thee Ophelia”:

These tears, great sobbing tears, adorn my cheeks.
Why did I stay away so long a time?
For Fate did take within those absent weeks
Your mind, soul, heart and very life betime,
Forever stole from me, your grace sublime.

Now my lament must seek to cleanse my soul
Of grief, deep seeded guilt which rends it now.
My inaction, only mine, made this bell toll
Which now decries dread Death upon your brow,
The icy grip of hell I did allow.

Now Death alone can give me my desire.
This life can never show to me your grace.
Right gladly will I face Death’s fearful fire,
For only in that dark and unknown place
May I look once again upon your face.

I could go on, but you get the point, or I hope you do, because I would be very pleased to have people share their own such youthful secrets with me in turn.

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.

I have often made this point in conversation, and I have implied it in various posts before, but let me make it a little more formally now:  we need to reject the assumption that one must be a writer, either by profession or by special vocation, in order to write.

As with so much else in our culture, we have come to believe that writing is best left to the experts, to those with the credentials or the publications that certify them as real writers, and our choice has become either to acquire these credentials and these publications so that we too can be real writers or to stop writing altogether.  Rather than accept this choice, a choice that assigns writing to the realm of the expert no matter how it is answered, we need to reclaim the place of amateur writing, not a writing that only accepts amateurism for a time as a means to pursue a future professionalism, but a writing that celebrates amateurism as such.  We need to reclaim a writing that addresses its own place, its own locality, its own community.  We need to write poetry for our spouses and stories for our children and letters for our friends, not because these things might one day be published, but because they will not be published, because their purpose is already fulfilled when they are received by those we love, and because it is precisely this that makes them valuable.

This kind of amateurism is not an excuse to write poorly, to write hastily, to write carelessly.  Quite the opposite: to write as a true amateur, to write out of love for writing and out of love for the one that writing addresses, is always to write with the utmost care.  It is precisely because I write for the one I love rather than for a public that I do not even know, precisely because I write as an amateur, that I write as best I can, always and in every case, as best I can.  Whether or not this writing meets the standards imposed by the world of publication is entirely beside the point.  These are the standards of professionalism, and they cannot measure what is written by the amateur.  The writing of the amateur finds its measure only in the relation between the one who writes and the one who receives, because the writing of the amateur is always this: a gift.  It is and can be nothing else.

I posted some time ago about textual apparatus and the web, and I have been thinking ever since about the kinds of tools that might be most appropriate to the kinds of textuality that find their place on the web.  More recently, I read Ivan Illich describe his use of footnotes as a place to share the things that he has collected through his reading, and I began to wonder how this more convivial approach to textual apparatus might be applied to the web as well.

In the midst of this wondering, I became increasingly dissatisfied with how I was linking to books and to their authors in my posts.  Sometimes I could find a useful place to link, but most often I was merely linking to some brief biographical page or to a short review of a book, usually something that I had searched out for the purpose and had not even bothered to read very thoroughly.  Yet, when I began actually studying other people’s linking practises, there did not seem to be many alternatives.  As long as people were linking to something very specific, the links were interesting, but as soon as they began linking in a general way, in order to provide a citation or some context or some supplementary information, the links ceased being useful.  They were links to information that was too general to be useful as a citation and too uninteresting to be useful for anything else.  I felt that this kind of linking was often worse than not linking at all, and it was certainly not a kind of linking that was reflective of my own reading of the web, but I was not certain what I might do instead.

A few days ago, however, I read a post called “Notes on Methodology” on the Philosophy and Modern Carpentry blog that was working through the difficulties of citing the web.  It is a longer post, and it does not touch on the question of citation until somewhere near the middle, but it argues essentially that citing the web is difficult because the web is changing c0nstantly and because, even with third party web archiving projects, it is not possible to ensure that what has been cited one day, or even one second, will be there the next.

Now, I have no real solution to this problem, and it is not even a problem that troubles me very much as such, but it is a problem that gave me a moment of clarity.  I realized suddenly that citing the web was never going to be the same as citing a physical artifact, at least not in the technical ways that academic writing has come to understand citation, but that citing the web might very well allow the kinds of footnotes that Illich was making, footnotes as a kind of sharing, and might do so to a greater degree than even Illich could have imagined.  Citations, in this sense, would perhaps cease to be useful as references, and this would remain a problem for a certain kind of writing, but they would become much more useful as a kind of recommendation, a kind of sharing.  They would cease saying, “This person wrote these words in this edition of this text on this date,” and they would begin saying, “This person is an interesting writer, or thinker, or artist, so take some time to check this link, however much it might have changed since I posted it for you.”  They would cease providing a justification or a supplement to what has been written, and they would begin providing the textual connections that the author feels are worth sharing.

In that moment, I realized how it was that I will change my practise of linking.  Rather than linking an author’s name to a brief biography that I would never be bothered to read myself, I will link to an essay or an interview or a story, something that I have enjoyed that has been created by or about the author.  Rather than linking the title of a book to a synopsis or a short review that is useful only at the level of basic information, I will link to an interview with the author or a scholarly article about the book.   Instead of accepting the illusion that these links can and should be made to justify and support the facts of what I am writing, an illusion that most of the web seems to maintain subconsciously, even if only in the most general way, I will foster the practise of making my links into recommendations to the things that I find interesting about the authors, books, directors, films, and ideas that become the subjects of my writing.  Instead of asking links to be technical or informational, I will ask them to be personal and convivial.

If everyone were to link like this, perhaps, just perhaps, we would end up following links more often, rather than just noting that they are there.