Thursday, September 20, 2007

Writing and Reading, the Difference

To Raphæl::

(We are concerned with the claims of writing and reading as especially attractive and amenable to academic expression. For the time being we shall forget the competing avenues of film, music, newspaper and television as social and cultural forces of dissemination.)

  • Just as we wear clothes both to belong and to stand apart, we write for entirely different reasons.
  • We wear clothes to belong because we're otherwise excluded from social contract on a wide scale, as prescribed by custom. We dress so we belong.
  • We dress differently so we can have a different signature, so that we can project a different persona, something different from the rest. We dress so that we know and everyone else knows that we are individuals (so we are always different even when we belong to the throng).
  • Just so with writing: we write primarily to express ourselves, as in a business communication, or we write to express what is not written.
  • As we become sophisticated in writing, we realise, more and more, that most of what we write is superfluous, too expensive to waste precious ink or effort.
  • Good writing is an exercise in identifying what is superfluous and avoiding it.
  • Good writing is an exercise in economy.
    • The economy is (only) on the receiver's side, and the economy is only a seeming economy. To the eyes, there is economy. to the mind, there is more effort to decode, assimilate, and infuse.
    • The economy, as achieved by good writing, is a misnomer.
    • It might more appropriately be called elegance. It is panache. It is an ideal worth striving for.
    • This elegance, this economy, is what separates pulp from serious writing. Pulp stays with you until the end of the book. Elegant writing makes you struggle for as long as it stays with you, and then it becomes a part of you, a part of brilliant and beautiful recollection. Pulp can be recycled and it comes back much the same to rouse the animal inside; elegant expression becomes a part of you and never troubles you.
  • Economy is achieved, as in life, with tremendous practice and tremendous effort and a lot of waste and torment. You first have to grow sick of your words (hearing too much of your voice) before you turn economising.
  • Just as only about ten percent of expression is conveyed by our words, only a portion of what we want to really say can be gleaned from the printed word.
  • A lot of things lay between the lines.
  • It is the reader's prerogative to either heed it or ignore it.
  • It is a personal thing for each reader: what one reader sees between the lines may not be what another sees.
  • Essentially, a reader sees a part of himself between the lines.
  • It is between the lines that the reader faces his test as a reader, as an attentive human being.
  • It is between the lines where the writer becomes either a monster or a mistress.
  • It's where all the action is, it is where the reader and the text interact and make their peace.
  • Like all named things writing has its own dialectic.
    • The writer should recognise and always be conscious of the dialectic.
    • The writer is wielding a double-edged sword: precision goes hand in hand with exclusion - the more precise the thing is, the less number of readers will like it.
    • It is not without reason that specialist topics do not find a large audience.
    • It also goes without saying that specialist topics have no final word on anything. (This applies to literature as well as science, but excludes mathematics. Mathematics makes its own space. the concept of numbers, in my opinion, is an abstraction and by its very nature an artificial concept, so there is no semblance t reality. Mathematics is purely intuitive and 100 percent logical. It is pure symbolism. Mathematics is totally an intellectual exercise.)
    • It is clear that we can have meaningful expression only concerning abstract things which will be uncontested by the claims of science.
    • Science is against exression (for its own sake).
    • Hence there can be no literature (art) in science, and no science in literature (art). The twine are entirely disparate, and not similar in any way.
    • Art and science are like fire and water.
    • Each requires entirely different mindsets, different contexts.
    • There can be compromise, in which case either one or the other will be corrupted.
  • Writing is a cover-up act.
    • The skill of the writer is not in how much he says, but in how much he manages to communicate in-between.
    • The skill of the writer is in providing an invitation to read (as in a newspaper - but a newspaper doesn't have to be readable, it inherits attention - attention is its birthright), and within a few minutes, with the reader in his grasp, make the newspaper completely redundant: so that he can spin his own yarn.
    • The skill of a writer is in making his own atmosphere - space - as the reader progresses both in time and grows in stature as a conscious, self-reflecting reader.
    • The skill of a writer is not just in showing himself (by implication) but in helping the reader identify himself somewhere, or identify himself everywhere. Alternately, the writer can show himself everywhere or nowhere.
    • The writer allows the reader to grow, to rest, and be peaceful.
    • After a time, the writer must nowhere be seen.
    • After a time, the reader and pure conscience shall remain.
    • At this point, there is only the text and the writer. There is pure consciousness, which cannot be carved up into reader and text. This is whole, this cannot be broken down, and it happens not because the writer has written but because the reader has read it in his own way. The writer has to so enrich and amuse the reader so he will be given a chance to entertain.
    • Writing does not exist without the reader.
      • Meaningful writing is always directed at an audience. (That is, you simply cannot have a jolly good time writing in an area covered with grass and depleted of all human folk with a single hare standing up.)
  • Reading, as in reading a novel, is not a 'denoted' purpose of writing.
    • Reading a novel is a luxury when we track back to the origins of writing in the Sumerian and Chinese hieroglyphics.
    • Writing was a means of accounting.
    • Writing was adapted by people of different vocations with different mindsets for different purposes.
  • Writing abets difference. Reading unifies and keeps a society together.
    • Writing is nomadic, reading is civilized.
    • Reading is an attempt to recollect, monitor, scan, verify; you can never get it back 100 per cent.
    • Reading is a lost cause, and writing is essentially aimless.
    • Writing is like sending an arrow from a longbow; even with no specific target, it can have a significant effect.
    • Reading is like collecting rainwater.
  • Reading and writing, since they employ the same symbols on the outside, do have their similarities.
    • You can write and miss the mark, and you can read and miss the point.


[Continued...]

  • Please excuse the bad proofing, only did a simple spellcheck on Google.
  • I suspect the piece is a tad too long.
  • Comments please...
  • And it will be some time before I follow this up... so be patient.

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