I'm still trying to write about my holiday. It is tremendously difficult. Not only am I starting to reconstruct my memories from the photographs I took (instead of the Mind's Eye of my visual memory,) I am starting to sense that nothing is ever adequate in expressing joy, and now, that intense longing. Because my interior landscapes are bigger than yours, this has opened up a larger, more pressing sphere of query and reflection. (I hate that word.)
Recall, then, some event that has left a distinct impresión on you — how at the corner of the street, perhaps, you passed two people talking. A tree shook; an electric light danced; the tone of the talk was comic, but also tragic; a whole vision, an entire conception, seemed contained in that moment. But when you attempt to reconstruct it in words, you will find that it breaks into a thousand conflicting impressions. Some must be subdued; others emphasised; in the process you will lose, probably, all grasp upon the emotion itself.
from How should one read a book? by Virginia Woolf
As Woolf so observes most eloquently and allusively, the amateur writer often struggles with recreating experience with the vocabulary of language. Actually, I think it's a condition that afflicts all people attempting to write — there is no word that can encapsulate an emotion, a feeling, a thought in its visceral totality. The lack in the lexicon of language becomes so overwhelming because it denies the possibility of elucidating an interiority; the lack is best described as a gaping void that, at worst, eats into the soul of writing. (Whatever that means. Maybe it's an ineffable drive in humans that animates the whole enterprise? Maybe it's the fundamental yearning to express our humanity, to preserve it in the face of time?)
What, then, is the writer to do? Writing appears to be futile, desolate and meaningless. And from where does satisfaction now stem from? Why write and, for that matter, why privilege language and literacy over other forms of human communication? The clichéd analytical framework of settling for The Best We Can is perhaps the most pragmatic solution, but in fails in the sense that it acts as a salve for the writer, but doesn't change what is written.
Since the problems associated with writing are, well, problematic, maybe I should approach writing with a slightly altered attitude. It isn't the mimetic representation of an experience, but the reconstruction of an imagined (recent) past framed by human cognition. It acknowledges the perceiving subject twice over — firstly, that the subject experiences the event, and secondly, how the subject is necessarily selective in framing and filtering the experience into language, whether immediately upon perception, or meditatively, in hindsight. On a larger level, this turns a limitation into a celebration of cognition. (It's kind of like, Yay for writers! They can create sophistication in meaning that is incommensurate with the simplicity of words strung together!)
Of course, it is naïve to think that the writer and his words exist in a closed system. Obviously, they speak to an audience (whether imagined or real) and the meanings of texts are often utterly contingent on the reader, i.e. the whole Reader-Response thing that is worth taking a look at on Wikipedia. (Maybe even the context. Then again, I ramble.) The relationship between the writer and the reader is thus a "messy" one disguised as a straightforward transaction between producer and consumer. Although it is worth discussing the limitations of the supply-demand model in the market for writing and publishing (two altogether separate yet symbiotic processes), the root issue lies within the realm of Meaning. Is signification (in the sense of the relationship between the signified and the signifier) a stable element in the text? Is it distorted, diminished over time? What kind of effect does it have on the reader, and do readers care anyway? It's something that Italo Calvino explores in If On A Winter's Night A Traveler but ultimately there are no definite conclusions, only ideas that trail off and reappear like fairy lights on a tacky fibreglass reindeer.
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