Some people will cavil at the prestigious title "writer" being applied to someone who writes a blog, preferring to call us "scribblers" or "scriveners" or "Bartlebys" or any other word as long as it is served with opprobrium.
Ah, well. So much for politics and our continual penchant for dimishing each other.
As a writer, I have learned:
(1) Ideas are damned difficult things to capture. It helps to have a fellow idea-hunter to talk to. All those great ideas you thought you had back home already safely in your zoological garden of Ideation...often if you look closely, they are rather tattered and threadbare...or are sick and ailing....or incontinent...or tend to attack the visitors.
Ideas are very much will-o-the-wisps ( I was going to say fatae morganae, but I've used that expression already this week.) and it is very hard to corner them. Good ideas are even scarcer. That's probably one of the main reasons why the world is a mess, lack of good ideas.
(2) A writer has a responsibility and duty to the world.
Conscious beings create the World-as-lived-in. They may not create the World-as-fact, where the Sun continues to shine, even when there are no humans left to view it, or feel its warmth, but they certainly create the World we live in: the moral order, the legal order, the religious order, the love and repulsion, the hospitality and the xenophobia...
A writer has a duty to the world to at least leave it as good as before he added to the building blocks of reality. It would not be all that bad if a writer left it a better place, too.
This is where the butterfly-effect comes in.
The butterfly-effect in reality doesn't come into play all that much; a butterfly flapping his wings 60 million years ago has little of no effect on the time-lines, because the wing-flapping-thing is swamped and drowned out by the other stuff going on.
However, in the world created by the communications of conscious beings, the butterfly-effect does work. That's how - for example - the religion of a bunch of ne'er do wells from Galilee was able to overrun the Roman Empire: butterfly-effect of a good thing...a really good thing. Some thing for the 12 tribes, and ditto for the small band of followers in Mecca. The butterfly wings actually raised the wind and blew away the past.
So, a writer typing at his keyboard may indeed affect the time-lines of the future. There is a responsibility to Reality. The Real, the human Reality, is not just some bloody ATM machine from which we may draw endless supplies of money from! If we withdraw and never deposit the good stuff, that ATM will rebel..when we drive up it will whisper in our ears: go to war! hate your neighbor! how long has it been since we had a good lynching? a car bomb ought to warm things up nicely!
And we drive away to do the dirty work created by those who did not recognize their Duty to Human Reality. God created Humanity in His image. There is absolutely no duty to God, which harms or injures other people or Human Reality.
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12 comments:
Hello, Montabulous.
I'm sorry, I seem to have developed an annoying habit of bothering you as you go about your business (and it's not even Friday yet, the day I'm supposed to be travelling through your October archives), so I'll give you some space after this one.
Interesting. I feel people are too precious with the word "writer" and, personally speaking, I have no trouble identifying someone who writes a blog as a writer. I mean, they write. They are writing. They are writers, surely? It seems sniffy and illogical to categorise and diminish people so, and I can't help feeling that those who do have a cruelty and/or insecurity that they can't quite mask and would probably need an outlet for elsewhere if they hadn't had the good fortune to alight on such an easy target (as bloggers). So, we are writers. (I just happen to write elsewhere for a "living", too, although blogging brings the greater rewards - none of them financial.)
But do writers really have a responsibility and duty to the world? I mean, yes, I feel that they probably do, but I'm not so sure I would single them out above anyone else, really (and I'm not saying that you are).
We all may feel that we have a responsibility and duty to the world (or that would be the ideal, I suppose, although I accept that it's far from the reality) and to place the burden on the shoulders of writers - making them special, somehow - may very well be seen to come from the same place that sees people dismiss the writing of bloggers as being somehow not "real" writing. Crikey, I'm making a mess of this. Does that make any sense?
If a special status is accorded to the responsibilities of writers, I mean, then it becomes easier for others (who may class themselves as "real" or "proper" writers) to look with a certain (unjustified) disdain at the efforts of those who become writers in their spare time. That sort of thing, anyway. I hope you can pick something from that wreckage. For a writer, I'm making an awfully good job of appearing like an inarticulate klutz.
As for the responsibility to reality, well.....a definition of reality would probably be required in order to feel the truth or otherwise of the sentiment. And if two people were to feel a different reality, which must we take as being "real" (as it is presented to us in the form of writing)? How is this decided? Or, if these two realities are diametrically opposed, must we make a choice as to which one we believe? And how, if we must do so - as opposed to simply accepting the differing realities of others and therefore putting the very notion of "reality" at risk - are we supposed to do this?
I'm not asking you these things directly, if that can possibly make sense, expecting (or demanding) that you supply answers, merely outlining my own difficulties with some of the concepts you raise, none of which I necessarily disagree (hate that word) with.
As a by the by, but if someone presented me with a body of your work, Montag, and said:"what does this guy do, then, smarty pants?", I wouldn't miss a beat before telling my (unreasonably rude, I feel) interlocutor that "he's a writer, you oaf, are you blind?"
That's more than enough for me.
Kind regards etc....
TPE
(And good luck with the book!)
And oh dear Lord, but I've just seen your poetry site. There goes January. How will I ever escape here? Slow down, slow down, I've not got enough air in my lungs or space in my head.....
Some of that poetry really sucks.
Remeber it was one per week, so they may be considered scribbles on a sheet of foolscap, and work to be done in the future.
I didn't mean to single writers out. I write, meaning it is the thing I can do well...there's so much to writing! I never appreciated how difficult it is to grab an idea off the assembly line and spiff it up...but it's terribly difficult for scads and scads of people.
As to definitions of reality, I would say that writing is my main method of partaking in the creation of reality.
So there is no definition of reality; we each do it ourselves: we create the world we live in against the assumed backdrop of some world-as-fact.
How to decide between two realities of different people? We do it all the time. Sometimes we have wars about it.
Communication is the creation of a shared reality. We talk it out, argue it, politic it. We also sculpt it, paint it, sing about it.
We are not seeking the one reality. The harmony of millions of spheres is not to be reduced to one steampunk sphere: one huge, grey, gigantic, metallic, rivetted, gasping, wheezing sphere...no way.
as for slowing down...surely you must feel that time is running out?
I shall return to this after Thanksgiving, for I may have grossly misread your note.
I have a heck of a time reading...
I shouldn't worry about it, Montag. I have a heck of a time writing....
A very happy Thanksgiving to you.
With kind regards,
TPE
(My comments have arrived back-to-front, surely? Weird. Anyway, see you after the break....)
Nothing will surprise me anymore. I have 4 "Mech" comments - possibly machine generated - waiting for me; they are uncanny, because when I try to mess with them, they take on a human air, saying that they like my spunk or whatever, but nevertheless resistance is futile!!
And some copies of some past comments, which I have already published and responded to, have suddenly re-appeared, and which resist being published or deleted!
Oh, by the way, tpe, I missed a comment of yours and found it.
You may look at the end of that naufragium-omnium-gatherum that is the comment area to the post about your eponymous avatar: TPE.
It must have been one of those comments who flew the coop. I welcomed it in as a prodigal son - killed the fatted calf, and all that - then forced it to listen to my reply...poor sap.
I went searching for it again:
Thursday, November 26, 2009 5:22:00 AM
tpe, somehow I missed this comment.
When you write of the different homes, you are describing a bunch of Temporary Autonomous Zones. Fascinating. And I thought Hakim Bey would never amount to anything!
Provocative?
I have never been asked or had to delete comments before.
Circumspice omnium adnotationum naufragia:
" (ille) docens manus meas ad proelium..."
I think that I was provocative.
I'm not sure whether I wish to be "provocative", since "provoke" and "invoke" have the same root.
I may have been "invocative".
Fascinating, eh?
This is interesting, more than I can express.
Writing to me is not the brute stamp of words upon page, for it is preceded by the struggle to hunt and snare a concept, notion, or idea...
and it seems the best ones are those that whizz by at the speed of incommunicado electrons...
That's why this is hard...
When someone says "they disagree", I don't feel anything but amazement at the great forum of conscious beings feeling up that strumpet elephant of the universe, and some saying it is like a snake (feeling the trunk), some saying it is like a tree (feeling the legs), etc.
Reality and Consciousness give what I can only refer to as an orgasmic hiatus that clicks in and out, causing me to be conscious, then not able to grasp consciousness...
Where did all this come from?
I think I recently wrote that all this creativity crap needs at least 2 to tango, for one alone is so limited...they need someone to communicate with..
that's why disagreement is like birthday gift...it indicates a potential for growth and increase.
Aha. Is that what all the fuss has been about? You are infected by nuisance commenters (and I don't just mean me, I mean the automatically generated variety - although I could be that, too, of course)?
What an absolute irritation. You're right, sadly, in that resistance is futile. It's one of those tiring things we are expected to take as a given out here in the frontiers of space (and/or at our kitchen tables).
I'll just content myself with reading what you've been saying here for the time being, if that's okay, trusting that I'll find this space again when I've formulated my response. It's nice, there's a lot to think about. A good feeling.
Kind regards,
TPE
You are right, there is so much to think about. And some days I wake up, and everything is totally different.
I like that better than the slumber of dogma. Better to wake up, and...I'll fly away!!
OK. So I have been reading some Arabic things, and some of the 1001nights, and there's this cool bit of poetry that deals with writing:
"There is no writer that will not perish; but what his hand has written will endure forever. / Write, therefore, nothing but what will please you when you will see it on the day of resurrection."
Cool in a somber way, but cool nonetheless. Cool like St. Augustine: " Let me be good, Lord...but not yet. Let me remain cool for a while."
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