December 26th, 2006
You might recognise the above from Richard III, or a Steinbeck novel, or something else. You might not recognise it at all. Writing is awfully strange, reading is stranger still. They can be immensely powerful processes, but they can also be just as wonderfully ineffectual.
Someone remarked quite sincerely that I was a person who loved words. I thought it rather strange at the time–a bit effusively intellectual–but yes, I have to admit that I do love words. But I have long known that words are too often sent unprepared, and under-equipped into the no-man’s land of another person’s mind.
I love silence as much as words, something which at first seems contradictory, but looking closer, is perfectly logical. To love silence is to make absolutely sure that you have something of worth to say, before you open your mouth, or put fingers to pen or keyboard.
This isn’t something that’s always possible: sometimes words are a necessity and can’t be mulled over at your leisure. Words as a product of these situations are usually characterised as the trivial, but every so often incredibly important words have to emerge in the same way. Many of our most important words depend on mere fractions of time; there’s an impedance mismatch between what you need to say and what you can. In those fleeting moments you may only manage clichés, but waiting for anything more would be to lose everything.
If you don’t have a lot of time to read, but love the whole process, you may want to read a play by Harold Pinter. They’re not that long and have a very distinctive style, something which I have been more drawn to than plots for a while now. Before the holidays I walked to the Chinese that’s down the road from my college to buy some chips and I talked to my friend about the motive behind reading books. If you’re serious about writing, then the motive becomes increasingly more functional, something which acts as a double-edged sword: you may be able to learn from the style, but ultimately everything you read will taint the “freshness” of your work. We came to the conclusion that it was best to read as little as possible, or at least carefully judge the ratio of whether you are indulging in something, or using it as a catalyst to create something else.
I read another thin book recently. I went into the library with the sole purpose of reading some philosophy, so I picked out “Why I Am So Wise” by Friedrich Nietzche. It’s part of a series of other similarly sized philosophy books called “Penguin Great Ideas”, which I intend on working my way through when I get back. It’s nice when you see some of your ideas validated in another’s work:
The scholar, who really does nothing but ‘trundle’ books–the philogist at a modest assessment about 200 a day–finally loses altogether the ability to think for himself. If he does not trundle he does not think. He replies to a stimulus (–a thought he has read) when he thinks–finally he does nothing but react. The scholar expends his entire strength in affirmation and denial, in criticizing what has already been thought–he himself no longer thinks…
For someone who has written so many books, it seems amusing that even Nietzche questioned the value of reading.
Ultimately, no one can extract from things, books included, more than he already knows. What one has no access to through experience one has no ear for… Let us imagine an extreme case: that a book speaks of nothing but events which lie outside the possibility of general or even of rare experience–that it is the first language for a new range of experiences. In this case simply nothing will be heard, with the acoustical illusion that where nothing is heard there is nothing.
There is this acoustical illusion in Pinter’s plays–where words are used as a veneer to coat a subtext that bubbles and simmers just below. The plays highlight the issue of how words are used as a barrier to communication and how they often do more to alienate rather than alleviate what is on your mind. His laconic characters awaken you to the language techniques we all use to shroud our emotions. Most of the time we don’t want to say what we truly think, I doubt we even have the ability to say what we truly think. This isn’t because what we truly think is necessarily awful; it’s because we can’t articulate it in a way that will guarantee what we are thinking will be reproduced verbatim in the recipient.
If the reader can’t extrapolate what we mean from our text, then all we can manage is vague approximations: to strive towards a catalyst that speeds up a certain reaction we want to create in the reader’s mind. Amongst all writers, I believe that poets put the most thought into not only the words they write, but also into the motives behind writing them. In Issue 84 of the Paris Review Philip Larkin, on being asked why he writes, replied:
The short answer is that you write because you have to. If you rationalize it, it seems as if you’ve seen this sight, felt this feeling, had this vision, and have got to find a combination of words that will preserve it by setting it off in other people. The duty is to the original experience.
He does not say he writes to preserve the original feeling as a crystalline copy, but instead to provide the conditions that will set the feeling off in other people. In his 50s fictional dialogue “Round the Point”, where the characters of Geraint and Miller argue the virtues of writing, Miller echoes this sentiment:
A writer’s development is a slow approximation to his fated position.
Usually questions provoke a response. But the paragraphs above seem to provoke the question on whether we can form thoughts without a language. Without giving that question any conscious consideration, everything above suggests that not only can we form thoughts without a language, but language itself is severely limited in representing those thoughts in the world outside our mind. Or–more accurately–representing those thoughts exactly in the world outside. Words may provoke responses totally different to what you wanted to express at the time, but wonderfully, if you had some method beyond words that allowed you to discover the reaction in the reader’s mind, what you might see may be more incredible than what you had originally envisaged.
…I’m against this poetry-as-a-craft business…Poetry (at any rate in my case) is like trying to remember a tune you’ve forgotten. All corrections are attempts to get nearer to the forgotten tune. A poem is written because the poet gets a sudden vision–lasting a second or less–and he attempts to express the whole of which the vision is a part. Or he attempts to express the vision… I am juggling with sounds and associations which will best express the original vision. It is done quite intuitively and esoterically. That is why a poet never thinks of his reader. Why should he? The reader doesn’t come into the poem at all.
–A letter written by Larkin at the age of 18.
December 27th, 2006 at 9:51 pm
I rather like the new photo on top, it’s very nice and moody.
Happy Christmas! I never got a chance to leave it online earlier.