Seconds

Jan. 31st

I belong to a small writer's collective which meets in the back room of a nearby pub. I had been reading stuff written years ago, mostly from my time in San Francisco. But this time I was ready to offer something new, only as the hour approached I hadn't written a thing.

I sat down two hours before our small group convened and hammered out whatever came to mind (much as I'm doing now). The result was an angry polemic about the futility of the writing group itself, and a charge to make our writing relevant, meaty, personal and public.

I was reluctant to read it.
But read it I did.

Since then, it has spawned fiery responses from the more "serious" writers of the group which have encouraged me to think more seriously about my own writing.

I'm presently reading Stephen King's "On Writing—a Memoir of the Craft." It's great. Even in his short reminiscences he demonstrates why he is such a popular and successful storyteller. In it he writes,

You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair—the sense that you can never completely put on the page what's in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page...it's writing damn it, not washing the car or putting on eyeliner. If you can take it seriously, we can do business. If you can't or won't it's time for you to close the book and do something else. Wash the car maybe. 

This is more or less a reiteration of my charge to the group (and really my charge to myself).

So what does it mean to not come lightly to the blank page? What is the point and purpose to writing, especially in a world of 100 million blogs?

You must find an audience. It matters not its size, but quality of composition counts for something.

In addition to Stephen King, I'm also revisiting my philosophical roots. I'm reading Richard Rorty. He's an American pragmatist. Generally, I like his writing—its dense and to the purpose without being verbose or unnecessarily obscure.

I have struggled mightily with notions of "truth" and "justification", and so have been grateful to read Rorty's essay, Universality and Truth. In general, Rorty rejects any notion that truth or value can have its basis in reality as it is, our there. 

For Rorty, truth is just that which you can justify to present or imagined future audiences. But not every audience is going to be considered competent. There will be bigots and crazies to whom you may feel no obligation to justify your own beliefs or actions. For the zealot, the non-believer's doubts hold no sway, and vice-versa.

I mention Rorty here only because I need some term of reference to justify my own actions, my own beliefs. The question I struggle with is Why Write? But before I can try and answer that question, I need (being raised as a good analytic philosopher's son) to figure out what would count at justification in the first place. Rorty's term of "competent audience" is helpful here. For Rorty, "everything depends on what counts as a competent audience."

So that's where I'm at. What counts as a competent audience? Who's opinions count? I would like to think of myself as an inclusivist—on principal excluding no one.  But that doesn't mean that everyone qualifies as a competent audience in every context. We may be inclusivists but when it comes to performing open-heart surgery, I'm not counting everyone's opinion as equally well-informed. So too with writing.

Abraham Lincoln is reputed as having said,

I have no greater [ambition] other than that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, rendering myself worthy of their esteem. 

A noble ambition, but even Honest Abe could not have meant, every man's esteem. He means here the esteem of only his fellow men (and presumably women).

Each of us must work this out for ourselves. Those lucky few who grew under the tutelage of a respectful adult likely have some internalized ideal. Those of us with less than ideal tutors struggle with shame and self-acceptance. We struggle because there was ambiguity or inconstancy in our audiences as children. As adults, our work is to replace that ambiguous and inconsistent audience with real, competent fellows—those whom we believe are capable of rendering just judgment on our behaviour and our efforts.

So I leave it there. The work ahead is to determine my competent audience—the group of individuals to whom I feel artistically and intellectually accountable. We must be careful, for those in whom we trust can make us great contributors to an improving society , or break our spirits entirely.

Which one are you?

This is my first post of my first blog. For many, this may not seem like much to blog about, but for me—and maybe I'm not alone here—writing something where someone may actually read it is akin to public speaking. It's reputed to be worse than a fear of death.

It has been a long road to get even here. I started by re-learning cursive writing from a grade-two school book nearly ten years ago, then working through the basic rules of punctuation and grammar, and then through the process of unlearning the basic rules of punctuation and grammar. And then there were months of daily free-writes: writing for no-one and nothing, writing that was not meant to be read, not even by me.

Recently I began reading some of that writing to a small group of odd fellows in the "Snug Room" of a nearby tavern. It went well. I read and heard others. Their comments of my work were encouraging. Mine of theirs, appreciated. And then, this Christmas, under the tree, written in pencil-crayon, were these words:

You will start a blog within 3 weeks from today. On this blog you will post min. 2 texts per month for 6 months. Love Kristina

Well, what was I supposed to do? There were no more excuses. I have used every one. And so here I sit, on the evening three weeks to the day from receiving my 'gift', writing to fulfil my mitzvah.

This is a small step, another in a long journey of small steps. This blog is known to no one. I will not spread it round my friends and no one will stumble upon it. It remains, for now, like a letter tucked under a stone—one letter under one stone among a field of  millions.

But this is how things begin.
All things begin in darkness.