From Word To Word

I had someone ask me today why I never seem to post any pictures on my blog.  She is not nearly the first person to ask this question of me, so I thought that I should perhaps be more explicit about my reasons for this choice.

It is not that I am rejecting the image as such.  I would argue that images are often the most effective and the most appropriate ways to convey ideas, and my interest in film has much to do with a sincere appreciation for how images communicate.  I link to images and films not infrequently for this very reason, and there is even a sense in which this whole blog is more imagistic than literary, since the web presents writing itself as image in ways that I may or may not take the time to discuss at some later point.

What I am rejecting is the image, not in general, but in this particular space.  I am rejecting the image as a way of visualizing this writing, my writing, in particular, and I do this as a way of drawing attention to how the image has come to dominate our modes of communication at the expense of the literary and the verbal.  I am not privileging the literary essentially.  I am only isolating it, in this time and in this place, to a certain degree, to raise the question of what is lost when the visual comes to displace the literary.  I am not advocating that we do without the visual.  I am only suggesting that we consider whether we are employing it in ways that are causing us to become less fluent with the literary.

I am aware, of course, that this gesture is largely a useless one, as our textual and aural media become increasingly remediated imagistically.  I am also aware of the irony involved in advocating a renewed sense of literate textuality through the hyper-visual medium if the internet.  These things do not really concern me, however.  What concerns me is only to model a particular relation to writing that recognizes how our general relation to writing is being subsumed within a broader relation to visuality.  I aim neither to reverse the visuality of our culture nor to reject this visual culture myself, only to open the possibility that a different relation between writing and visuality might still be possible.

I wrote a week or so ago about a list that Georges Perec includes in his book Species of Spaces.  I had not read very far in Perec’s text when I wrote that post or I would have realized that his style, at least in this particular work, the only one that I have read, is largely dominated by the form of the list, which becomes a kind of stylistic motif. Vast portions of the book are made up of lists, and Perec’s descriptions of the spaces that he is contemplating almost always take this form. He even instructs his readers to approach the world in the mode of the list.

For example, in the section on “The Town”, he says, “Make an inventory of what you can see.  List what you’re sure of.”  Earlier, in a section on “The Street”, he describes the literary observation of an urban landscape in precisely the same way.  He instructs his audience to list the items around them, not the uncommon things, but the obvious and seemingly unimportant things.  “Make an effort to exhaust the subject, even if that seems grotesque, or pointless, or stupid.  You still haven’t looked at anything, you’ve merely picked out what you long ago picked out.”  A few pages later, he describes the purpose of this process: “Carry on,” he admonishes, “until the scene becomes improbable, until you have the impression, for the briefest of moments, that you are in a strange town or, better still, until you can no longer understand what is happening or what is not happening, until the whole place becomes strange, and you no longer even know that this is what is called a town.”  What is being articulated here is a practise of writing that is explicitly concerned with the form and the function and the aesthetics of the list as a literary form.

It interests me that Perec locates the function of the list in its ability to defamiliarize what it is describing.  He suggests that, by attending to the common place, by itemizing, inventorying, cataloguing what is commonplace, the list, at least in the extreme and desirable case, makes these things strange. The items in the list become suddenly foreign, unrecognizable, incomprehensible.  In this way, at least according to a certain formalist tradition of literary criticism, Perec is making an argument for the list as a legitimate literary genre, since formalist critics often identify defamiliarization as one of the primary functions of literature and art.  By demonstrating that the list is capable of this kind of literary effect, not occasionally, but in a sustained way, Perec is essentially showing that the list should be understood as a literary form, as an artistic form.  Considering the affection that I have for the well-written list, I appreciate Perec’s efforts on its behalf.

I have a lengthy list of things that I could be writing.

My wife ran her Food for Thought event this past weekend, and there is much that I would like to say about the occupation of Palestine and of the parallels to the treatment of the native peoples here in Canada and of the nature of my responsibility in these things.

I have just finished reading Robert Graves’ I, Claudius and Claudius the God, and I would like to talk about how Graves uses the texts to reflect on the kind of history that he is writing.  There is also a story that I have long wanted to tell about a literary coincidence between Graves and C. S. Lewis, and this would be as good a place for it as any.

Don Moore’s recent series of comments on one of my older posts has had me digging through my notes on Emmanuel Levinas, and I have rediscovered several things that would relate well to the conversations that I have been having about solitude, about coping, and about the unrecognizability of God.  I will need to write on these things at some point.

I have also had several ideas for the children’s novel that I have been writing, of which I have posted the first chapter.  Some of these ideas will require me to rewrite portions of the earlier chapters substantially, and I am wanting to do this work as soon as I can.

This is what I would write today, if I was not marking.

In the introduction to The Practise of Everyday Life,  Michel de Certeau argues that a certain kind of visuality has come to dominate our perception.  “Our society,” he says, “is characterized by a cancerous growth of vision, measuring everything by its ability to show or be shown, and transmuting communication into a visual journey.  It is a sort of epic of the eye and of the impulse to read.”  It is not vision itself that is the problem here, but a cancer of the vision, not the eye itself, but the eye grown epic.  The problem is the demand that everything be shown to the eye in order that everything might be read, a demand that automatically reduces all communication to mere spectacle.  The problem is that things are understood to have value only insofar as they can be measured and consumed by the eye.

For this reason, de Certeau argues for a particular kind of reading.  In this kind of reading, “the reader insinuates into another person’s text the ruses of pleasure and appropriation.”  The reader “poaches on the text, is transported into it, pluralizng himself in it like the rumbling of one’s body.”  The reader thus produces the book rather than merely consuming it as a visuality, producing it as something to be remembered rather than merely read.  Using “ruse, metaphor, arrangement,” de Certeau argues, “this production is also an invention of memory.  Words become the outlet or product of silent histories. The readable transforms itself into the memorable.”  The text that has been only a readable object for the consuming eye, becomes a memorable invention of the productive mind, dislocating the reader from mere consumption and the text from mere visuality.

A few pages later, in the beginning of the book proper, de Certeau begins to speak of a writing that also disrupts consumption of the text through the figure of the anonymous man, the everyman, the one who is everybody and nobody at once, arguing that “the straying of writing outside of its own place is traced by this anonymous man.”  Here de Certeau describes a writing to parallel the kind of reading that he has just been discussing in his introduction, a writing that invites its readers to reproduce it, to rewrite it, to remember it, rather than merely to consume it.

This kind of writing offers the reader the opportunity to identify with the anonymous man as “the metaphor and drift of the doubt that haunts writing,” as “the phantom of its vanity,” as “the enigmatic figure of the relation that writing entertains with all people, with the loss of its exemption, and with its own death.”  The image here is of the ghost or the phantom, the reminder and the remainder of death, that haunts the house, that makes it enigmatic, that becomes the source of stories and legends, that makes of the house more than can be seen and measured.   This is the function of the anonymous man also, to haunt the text, to remind us of our relation to the everyman who is both tragic and farcical, both ghostly and material, both dying and surviving.

This figure, the one with whom I am invited to identify, opens the text to a reading that is memorable, that is related to my own history and my own memory.  It is no longer a text that allows me to see it at a distance, but one that invites me participate in it, to produce it, to remember it.  The anonymous man, to play a little on this idea, is presented to me as one who is dismembered but in whom I can nevertheless recognize myself, despite or even because his dismemberment has made him anonymous, and this figure requires of me that I remember it, that I suture its limbs together so that I can see myself in it.  I am forced to make something of it, to actively create something that never was and never could be presented to my eye, something that escapes a mere passive and consumptive visuality.

In this sense, I would like my writing to be haunted, to be monstrous, to be uncanny.  I want it to stray out of its place.  I want it to be the habitation of things that neither I nor you can wholly see or understand, but that therefore confront us with ourselves, and with each other, and with our limit.

My friend Tom Abel comes and meets with me on Tuesday afternoons.  The purpose for our meetings, ostensibly, is to read Martin Buber’s I and Thou, but we make remarkably little progress week over week.  We begin with the text, but it always takes us elsewhere, which is, as I have argued many times, exactly what reading should do.

Yesterday, one of the ricochets in our conversation struck the question of how we come to define ourselves as human beings in our social and cultural landscape.  More plainly, we were wondering exactly how we managed to enter highschool with very little idea of who we were and exit it with an idea of ourselves that has remained largely operative ever since.  What, we asked, was the catalyst for this self-realization.

As we proceeded to tell the stories of this experience in our lives, it became obvious that the central element in both narratives was the role of writing.  Both of us identified our increasing ability to define ourselves with an increasing ability to express ourselves through language, particularly in its written forms.  For both of us, it seemed that our growing linguistic ability allowed us to define ourselves precisely as people who had this ability, and also provided us with the tools and the vocabulary to express this self-definition to ourselves and to others.

Now, there are those, perhaps, even probably, whose aptitudes and interests produce an experience of self-definition that is not primarily linguistic.  There are also those, almost certainly, for whom this experience of self-definition does not occur during highschool.  There are even those, I suspect, unfortunately, who never have this experience at all.  Even so, I am interested in the degree to which both Tom and I found this self-defining process to be interrelated with a coming to writing.  I am curious to know how common this experience is and to understand more fully how writing and self-definition are related.

My very preliminary thoughts on the subject would include a strict insistence that a linguistic facility can never be adequate to the self as such, but can only ever define the self sufficiently for my own needs.  Though my linguistic self-definition certainly bears a relation to the self that I am, I would argue that this relation is not essential.  Its function is not to reveal the self, but to translate, construct, produce, define, delimit the self in ways that permit me to function in the world.  Beyond this, however, I am uncertain how to proceed, and I would welcome the contributions of others on the subject.

I have written previously about the significance of solitude, but recently I have been feeling acutely the lack of this kind of aloneness, and this sense was heightened yesterday as I was reading a blog called Daily Routines, which describes the habits of famous writers and artists.  It struck me forcefully how divergent my preferred routines would be from the ones that I actually live, because of work and family and other obligations.

My inclination would be not to have to see or speak to anyone from when I wake in the morning until early afternoon or even later.  I would prefer to breakfast and lunch alone, and this would be time that I spent doing nothing but thinking, or reading, or writing.  If it was to be spent thinking, I would want to be working at something as well, in the garden or the kitchen usually, but almost anything would do.  If it was to be spent reading or writing, I would want to be working at something more intermittent, something that permitted me merely to surface now and again, like a pot of soup stock or a batch of bread.  In any case, I would need a steady supply of very dark coffee, something to keep a bitterness on the back of my tongue.

Sometime in the afternoon, I would begin to exhaust my focus, and I would want conversation with someone.  Ideally, this person would be comfortable enough with me and my house that we would work together to prepare supper as we talked.  There would not need to be any particular form to this conversation.  Its purpose would be only to sift what I had done that day, to share it with another mind, to have it returned to me in a different form than I first shared it.  This exchange might happen over coffee again, but I would prefer by far that it happen over a red wine that was very dry, something harsh to the palette.  I dislike subtlety in wine.

I would prefer to have supper with several people, five or six at most, and I would want most of them to know one another, so that conversation need not remain long on superficialities.  This meal should linger, enveloping the whole evening, taking into itself the coffee that accompanies the dessert and the scotch that follows it.  In the summer, it should end on the porch with my pipe, in the winter, by the fire with a hot toddy, and I should spend at least an hour longer alone there after everyone else has left.

In practice, however, and probably for the better, my life very seldom resembles this ideal.  From the moment that my youngest son wakes me in the morning, I will likely not have a moment of solitude all day long.  If I accomplish reading or writing or anything at all, it will be in the few grains of time that I glean from the wake of my children, and my work, and my other commitments.  I might find a few minutes of aloneness as I am walking from one place to another or when those in my house are distracted by something else, but I can rarely predict these moments.  I seem only to have discovered them when they are ended.

In most senses, I do not begrudge this lack.  The things that seize my time are things that I value very much, and I am happy to give them their due.  There are moments, however, when I long for nothing else than the space for aloneness, when the difference between my ideal and actual routines seems about to break me.  Most of all, what I want of this solitude is silence, or at least the quietude that is more silent than silence, the quietude of natural sound when it suddenly finds itself in the absence of the human and  artificial.  I want to hear nothing that demands anything of me but grateful inattention, and I sometimes long for nothing more than this quiet and this solitude.

I am guilty, I think, of wanting to put writing in its place.  At least, I am guilty of wanting to put it into the places that the literary world has traditionally tended to put it.  Though I find myself comfortable with publishing certain modes of writing though the medium of the blog, for example, there are other modes that I have assumed to be out of place in this medium.  The short essay seems a natural fit for the blog, of course, as does the news article, the personal reflection, and even the poem.  Longer prose, however, especially book-length works that would need to be serialized, do not obviously lend themselves to the restrictions of a blog, and I have always assumed that their place was elsewhere.

I recently had this assumption challenged, however, when I was mentioning to a friend of mine that I wanted to post some of my longer prose on the web but that I was not looking forward to the hassle of maintaining yet another webspace.  She asked, innocently enough, why I did not just post this stuff on my blog.  When I tried to argue that it was too long, she pointed out the very long history of serialized writing in English literature.  When I reminded her that I found most of this tradition tedious and verbose, she told me that my prose style seemed a perfect match.  I submitted, as I almost always do, to her superior force of argument.

So, while I still have some reservations about the idea of posting longer prose in the medium of the blog, I will be experimenting with this possibility to a degree.  I will begin with some existing creative pieces that are fairly short in any case.  I will also try posting some chapters from a still incomplete children’s novel that I am writing, since its chapters are also quite short.  Depending on the success of these experiments, I might begin posting other things as well.

It may be, of course, that my assumptions will be justified and that a blog will not be convenient for these kinds of writing.  In the worst case, however, I need only to delete the experimental posts and pretend that they never existed.  I have never been beyond a little historical revisionism, particularly when my own pride is at stake, so I am prepared, for the moment, to be writing out of place.

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 that is just 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.