Opaque Versus Transparent

 Arnold Toynbee

I have received great praise which carries a great criticism enwrappt within the laudatory petals of its bloom: an old friend says she loves the blog, but finds it a bit obscure at times. Hmmm. I have never known how to deal with this. I mean, does one rattle on and on, explaining every bloody thing, totally assuming that one's readers are incapable of knowing things on their own and are strangers to our common history, thereby insulting one's audience?

For myself, I find it very hard slogging through blogging where the expositor feels the need to pad out their written matter of already dubious value with explanatory paragraph after paragraph of things they feel necessary to ensure a complete understanding of their oeuvre. However, others near and dear to m'self have said, "True, but...", this last conjunction being followed with an exasperated query as to why I feel the necessity to be obscure.

For example, sometimes I write in Latin. Well, everybody reads Latin...surely. When I was young in days of yore, I went to the library and read Toynbee's A Study Of History in its entirety. I was impressed on how Mr. Toynbee quoted the French and the German and the Classic Greek and Latin writers of history...and the Arabic writers who formed the bridge between Classic culture and the present day and who were the great travellers and historians of their age. He quoted them in their original form without translation. The unspoken assumption was that the reader had enough of the French, German, Latin, Greek, and Arabic that he should be able to muddle through.

Well, there you have it. Everybody should read a little Latin. I do not use Greek, because I have no font available for it. When I use Arabic, it is a horrible transliteration which pleases neither writer nor reader. My French is jejune, and my German tends more to a yiddische yenta's chatter. I guess I assume people are familiar with literature and cinema. Of course I do... The very last thing I shall do is provide a synopsis of a film or story for someone too slothful to immerse themselves in the narrative arts.

Go to films. Read books. You do not have to spend a lot of time. When I do not like a film, I get up and leave. And I usually give books 20 pages to establish some sort of empathy with me; failing that, they are tossed aside like the detritus which they are. My vocabulary? I write pretty much the way I speak. I repeat stock phrases over and over. How many times have I said "...like a yiddische yenta..."? Lots. Or "......like a momzer..."? Oodles and oodles. Someone took me to task about what I thought was a pretty good bon mot using the philosopher Martin Heidegger. It turns out they were not fully cognizant of Martin Heidegger qua philosopher, and they took it all ill, thinking I was somehow making fun of their epistemological deficiency.

Nothing, I repeat, nothing had been further from my mind. However, once they had brought this to my attention, I can assure you that I shall indeed be making fun of them sometime in the near future! In fact, now is as good a time as any. If anything, I am too transparent. My ideal is to try to present things and let the reader make the connections: present everything and by your presentation hint at the underlying logic you feel; then leave the reader to their own "A-ha!" experience. "A-ha!" experiences stay with people, whereas tedious didacticisms do not.

The whole process resembles how a film "means" , to steal a phrase; it resembles cinema more than essay writing. (I must admit that frequently the logic is a bit "non-linear" which seems to defeat the "mid-wifery" of this filmic process; instead of delivering the child of understanding, we seem to end up in a louche bar near Soho...) You will notice that I usually fall far short of this ideal. I say in my defence that I have only been working on it for a short time and shall strive for improvement.

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