Stepping Outside

            Hello there reader, I hope you’re having a wonderful day so far. And I also hope I can do my small part to improve your day… or at least I hope I don’t make it worse! Well, here’s hoping—anyways, anyways, anyways, I was talking yesterday about some awfully confused notions. The thought, more or less, was that writing, when we’re not addressing ourselves to one particular reader, could be regarded as a kind of prayer, or at least an attempt at a prayer. I suggested this might be the case because when we do certain kinds of writing, we don’t preoccupy ourselves with the thought of how our writings could affect any particular reader. Say, when we write a love letter, we always and essentially mean for it to be read only by one specific individual. We may even be quite mortified if anyone other than our intended audience reads it! But if a novel, for example, were written for one individual and one individual alone, why—we would only need to print one copy! This kind of writing, the writing of stories and some poems, in short what we call literature, is always directed at something that transcends the individuality of any given reader. Whatever else literature may be, it is always at least partially written or shouted into the void itself, in the hope that it may prove to be an active void.

            But what then, is this author, this projector of meanings off into infinity? At the highest moments, at the very best moments, at the moments of reading that make us love reading, we never feel that we’re reading the words of any individual human being. We always feel as though, given the necessary skill, we would have written precisely the same words in precisely the same way—there’s something immediate, something pre-reflective in our reaction to a beautiful passage, a perfectly executed incident, a feeling that the words reach into that part of us that is most us. We no longer feel separate from the characters in the scene, from the author of the book, from the countless other readers who will doubtless experience precisely the same thing. At moments like this, our reading gets caught up in, and somehow becomes identified with, the writer’s act of writing and all the individual instances of reading that all the readers of this book will ever experience. In a way, we stand outside of time and become all readers, past and future, and we become the author as well; in this way, however briefly, we overcome the constant flux and variation of the world and tap into something truly eternal.

            But to return to the original question, what must we say about the act of writing if we accept that it can produce these effects? Well, for one, we have to say that writing, when pursued faithfully and perfected by however much practice it takes, is an activity that is able to originally produce this sort of effect in the author. It is precisely when authors forget themselves as individuals that they become able to produce these sublime moments, to speak as if from the mouth of eternity itself. What is that horrible old cop-out they call writer’s block if not an excess of self-consciousness?

            Self-consciousness, to a great extent—although this, I think, gets extremely complicated and there’s a lot of nuance and imprecision here—is the enemy of real creativity. The highest, most sublime, most beautiful moments in any of the arts have been produced, I think, by (although it sounds like, and in fact is a paradox) a sort of controlled release of self-consciousness. Technique, in this case literary technique, is always present, and without technique writing just becomes sloppy and rambling and incoherent—a lot like this blog, really. But, however necessary technique may be, it’s still not enough to produce the moments that allow us to forget ourselves.

The most technique alone can produce is an eerie feeling that the author of a book is sitting there with us inside of our skulls, talking to us like some kind of daemon or bad conscience. And this is a great effect, it’s really really cool to just be reading along and suddenly saying, “Oh hey there, author! I didn’t realize you’d be visiting me here in my head today. I’m terribly sorry about the mess, I would have cleaned up a bit if I’d have known you were coming. Now, not too much of course, I don’t want to look like the sort of person who has to clean up their mind every time an author visits… but at least a bit. And… please don’t look under the cerebellum.” Don’t get me wrong, this is cool, this takes a lot of skill and patience, but it doesn’t make us step out of ourselves. It’s remarkable, but not beautiful. There’s a forgetfulness in beauty, and a kind of return. You have a beautiful day, reader.