Ideal Readers

            Good evening, dear reader. I hope you’re doing well. Sometimes I can’t help but wonder who you are, out on the other end of this massive, marvelous, mysterious technological net of ours. Are you young? Old? Are you a man or a woman, or something more subtle? Who do you love? What do you hope for? What are you afraid of? How many languages do you speak? What were the moments that have defined your life? What would you be willing to die for? More importantly, what are you willing to live for? Do you cry often? Have I met you before? Will I ever see you again? Why do you read?

            I can’t help but wonder these things. Here I am, reader, writing for you and only you, but you could be any face I see on the street. You could be the pimply high school student behind the counter who took my order and had to ask the supervisor for help entering it into the register. You could be the driver I saw pulled over for speeding, or you could be the officer I watched walking up to the car window. You could be the President of the United States. You could be the pretty jogger who flashed a smile at me while I was out walking the dog. You could be anyone. In fact, all I can say about you with any kind of certainty is that you are, right now, reading this blog entry of mine on some kind of electronic screen, your face bathed in pallid luminescence. Now, what do I have to say to you, what can I say to you, reader, that I would be willing to say to anyone in this entire world?

            But then again, this is hardly an unusual situation. This is the writer’s constant predicament. As writers, we’re always projecting words out into nothingness, speaking not really to any particular person, speaking not really with the goal of sending any particular message, yet always having the image of an ideal reader in mind. But what is this ideal reader? Could anyone we meet on the street have any chance of being an ideal reader? Somehow I doubt it. Any actual reader would, quite naturally, have to read and interpret and experience a text through the lens of their own experiences, their own time and place, their own habits and prejudices. A real existing human individual reads a text, and more or less unconsciously experiences the text as a mirror of their own occupations and preoccupations. For example, the books that most infuriate us are often the books that threaten to show us the parts of ourselves that we feel most uncomfortable with. But the point is this: that none of us individual readers can experience a text in its absolute reality—and the author himself is not exempt from this limitation. Writing a text, while it does give the benefit of more sustained attention to a text, a more immediate understanding of its structure and interrelations, is at best a kind of head start for comprehension. A diligent reader of Melville probably understands Moby-Dick far better than Melville did.

            But again, just what is this ideal reader? Is it something in the air, flying on the wind of the language itself? I wonder sometimes, whether the ideal reader is something like the language itself, or to go even further, whether the ideal reader is the phenomenon of language as such. Call it a bit of occupational bias on the part of writers, but I think we tend to experience the world as a great machine designed for the purpose of describing things, naming things, saying things about things. We writers see an essentially messy world and want to put it into a kind of verbal order. If that’s so, or at least if a significant portion of writers think of the world as being that way, then what’s to stop us from saying that writing is what happens when a mind becomes so thoroughly steeped in language that it can only live if it is constantly trying to put the world into words that somehow stand outside of time? What if the ideal reader is the future, time itself? What if writing were an attempt to take our fragmentary experience and integrate it into an order that stands outside of time?

            What I’m expressing here, poorly, is a thought somewhat along these lines: what if writing, in the last analysis, is none other than a religious phenomenon?

Does a writer write into the void as a way to try to speak to God, or Time, or Being, or the Self, or whatever name you choose to indicate the ground of our existence? Is every play a morality play, every poem a prayer, every novel a hagiography, every treatise a piece of theology? Logically speaking, we have to say no: from Nietzsche to Dawkins, plenty of authors have written quite explicitly of the nonexistence of any sort of divinity. How could we ever construe such lines as the famous “God is dead” as being fundamentally prayerful? How could we, indeed. And yet…

I apologize, reader. I’m not sure what I’ve got in mind here. Maybe nothing. I hope you can make more sense out of this than I’ve been able to, reader. I give you all my best, dear, dear reader.