Candy Lightning

            Good evening reader. You know, sometimes I can’t help but sit here and imagine just what it is you get out of these posts of mine. It’s very odd, isn’t it, that I can very clearly say exactly what I’m thinking at the moment I’m writing this (here’s a hint: it’s exactly what I’m typing), but every time I try to imagine all the possible ways that you, the reader, the only reader, could possibly react to these writings, I go all funny-like in the brainbox. It’s a dizzying sensation, a little like falling, a little like vomiting, but more than anything it’s like thinking of all the possible interpretations that lie within any given text. It’s incredible, isn’t it? Say, for instance, a real literal-minded sort of person were to read this blog post, this one, right here. Why, they’d quite likely stop reading quite quickly, or else keep reading and reading, thinking things like, “Get a load of this guy. He’s a complete idiot, he doesn’t even know what he’s talking about and he’s just conjuring up all these meaningless hypothetical cases to distract from the fact that he’s clearly not saying anything.”

            (To which, incidentally, I would have to plead guilty. But I would also feel obliged to point out—if I may be allowed to preemptively respond to my hypothetical detractors—that we are all alike guilty of this very same sort of charlatanry.)

You just cannot talk about interpretation without even mentioning Hermes.
Although somehow this painting terrifies me.

            I’m enjoying this, so let’s have another couple of examples. Say there were someone reading this who had rigorously studied literary theory for years, for many years, for a whole lifetime. Such a one would probably not dedicate an undue amount of time or thought to what I’m actually saying here—that is, to the matter of the message—to them this is a matter of course, a bit of theory that’s been batted about so long that when they come across it it’s like beating a dead horse with another dead horse. This person would pay far more attention to the form of the piece, to the words, their order, their placement, the sound of the words—literature is nothing without an abiding love for the sound of the words, after all. They would analyze the way the text is organized, really get to know its formal aspects intimately, and look at the way in which the effect of the piece is constructed. They would probably also disparage the author a bit for the naiveté of his presentation, the clumsiness of his use of critical terminology—and above all, for his excessive love for the dash. (What can I say? It’s my favorite piece of punctuation.)

I was not about to look up a picture of two dead horses!

            One last example: say someone were to read this post without knowing a word of English… well, they’d… eh. They probably wouldn’t get much out of it. Reminds me, I seem to remember seeing something about a translator option you can put on your blog… might wanna add that sometime soon. Not today, of course—it’d spoil the joke—but sometime.

            But enough of these examples. The point is, is that a thousand different readers would read this very same post and not one of them would take exactly the same thing from the reading of it. Granted, many of the readers might have broadly similar reactions, so that by any reasonable criteria we could call them the same: a few of these may be impatience, annoyance, or homicidal rage directed against the author—hopefully an extremely rare reaction, that last one. I concede that there may be some chance, however slight, of a small handful of readers actually enjoying reading this post. But even though there may be a great deal of overlap between your reaction, reader, and that of a number of others, it is unthinkable that anyone else would react to this post in an absolutely identical fashion.

            Which, to be perfectly honest, reader, is one of the purest and most unadulterated joys of writing. Probably as the result of some peculiarity in our nature, we readers have always been at least fairly sensitive to this sort of phenomenon going on in stories, in novels, and in poems especially. In my own case, I know that my favorite part about reading came, now and again, at those moments when the book I was reading seemed—how to say it? It’s like, as you’re reading it, the book collapses in on itself, and in a flash you see for the first time some great abiding truth of the universe spread out before you on the page. Or no, it’s not like that at all, it’s more like you’re sitting there, reading along, when you suddenly see a narrative you thought was going one way turn out instead to be flowing in precisely the opposite direction, and you find yourself unexpectedly giddy with the shock of the revelation.

            It was these moments of semantic vertigo that, more than anything else—more than anything else?—really led me to discover my calling in writing. The sudden realization of uncountable infinities of meaning and possibility… it was like being struck by candy lightning. I had to discover how it was done, how an author could possibly bring this sort of thing about. To this day I haven’t the foggiest idea how it works, but maybe somehow I’ll manage to figure it out. I can’t possibly be the only one who’s experienced this, can I reader? Somehow I doubt it. Well, a wonderful night, morning, afternoon or evening to you, dear reader. Thanks for reading.