creation

it's Sunday and I'm having a very unproductive day....looking through Twitter....watching/ listening to youtube videos...as I write this I'm listening to an interview of David Foster Wallace by Charlie Rose (in 1997)....and writing this. 

Writing is not easy. Writing this blog is not easy, and I would love to (and want to, one day) write a book, and that's even harder, or maybe it's not...I don't know, but I admire people who write books...in general, I mean - I admire the achievement. 

I'm listening to another David Foster Wallace interview now, by David Kipen in 2004. This one is getting more into the technique(s) of writing, which is interesting. but I could listen to him talk about anything. 

Wallace is talking about how he finds writing fiction so much easier than non-fiction. I've often wished I could write fiction. I enjoy literature, but I can't seem to produce it. At uni, part of our first year English course was creative writing, and I did very well at it. The mark I got for my creative writing project was actually the highest mark I have ever received for anything (to the best of my memory, and I think I would remember). But that's because what we were taught was that creative writing wasn't about starting with a good idea and then executing it, it was about playing with language, and we were taught some ways of doing that, which I really enjoyed. And I noticed that this way of doing creative writing was somehow like painting, which I also did and also wasn't very good at in a traditional sense....the idea of playing and trying stuff - being experimental and exploratory. So, for my final project I came up with an idea for combining visual creativity and language creativity in an interesting way. I didn't know what I was producing but I had an idea about how I was going to do it that I was very excited about. It was actually incomplete when I submitted it, but it wasn't really the kind of work with regard to which completion means anything. In anoher sense it went beyond completion....like, you could take out parts of it and they were complete in their own right...a kind of poetry. 

So, going into second year, I had this idea that I was good at creative writing, so I enrolled in a whole course about creative writing. But it didn't go well. I actually failed because I just didn't end up doing the work. The problem was that, for whatever reason, everyone doing this course was now actually trying to do 'proper' creative writing - writing actual stories, and just using the techniques as a way of producing 'real' creative writing. I tried, and that was probably the problem. I feel the need to produce a certain kind of product and I really can't. First of all, when I try to create 'proper' creative writing - when I try to write a story - I write very slowly, but then, that would be OK if what I wrote was at all good, but it's just so....I think the best current word to use for it is 'cringy'. 

I don't know how to make up stuff that simulates reality. I'm not very creative in that sense. I tend to think and write what seems to me to be true. 

I keep coming back to the idea though, of writing something like a novel, or maybe it will just be an extended piece of writing. I do like the idea of making things up. I like doing that when I'm blogging. I haven't done it so much, if at all, in this blog but I did it a few times in my old blog - caeusura - which I have now closed and deleted. I would make up characters and circumstances, but I only do it when I want to, because it's kind of fun. I couldn't expand those elements into a short story, never mind a novel.  I can't sustain all the elements of a fiction...I have to keep grounding what I'm writing in reality. I like having the freedom, which I'm experiencing in this very moment, to do whatever I want from this point on. I have no idea what my next paragraph is going to be like, just as, before I wrote this paragraph, I didn't know what it was going to be about. 

But I've heard novelists talk about their work like that. They begin with an interesting premise and see what happens. They don't know how their work is going to develop, and what makes their work really zesty and compelling is their sense of suspense and drama and anticipation. 

theory as thinking

Something I never thought I would see/ hear, but I have lately, is people expressing the view that critical theory is something evil and destructive. They say that its agenda is to undermine western or Judeo-Christian values. Marxist literary theory is especially pernicious, but so is post-colonial theory, post-modernism, all of the French theory - Foucault, Barthes, Derrida. 

In this argument, critical theory is linked with certain ideologies and ideological constructs which are regarded by the people making the argument as harmful, toxic and doing actual damage to society. I don't want to name or discuss those ideologies because I don't want to engage in an ideological debate or argue one way or another about ideology. 

To me, critical theory has always been about understanding literature. Critical theory - at least the kind that I am interested in - is primarily concerned with literature, and not with ideology, although I can see how it could be applied to ideology, and there probably are critical theory texts that have more ideological implications. 

For me, as a student of English/ Literature, that subject is what critical theory is about and that's why it interests me. It was very liberating when, in my first year of my degree majoring in English, I was taught about all the different theoretical approaches to literature. It was like an overview of the whole field of literary theory. We had a week or two of lectures about each different approach....structuralism and semiotics, post-structuralism, post colonial theory, and yes - Marxism, Russian Formalism, etc. But it was the ideas that were fascinating. There was nothing ideological about it (at least as far as I could tell). 

Why I say that it was liberating was because, in high school, they teach you a certain way of approaching and understanding literature, and they give you the idea that that's it - that's how you analyse literature. And, for me, it's a boring approach...you identify certain key aspects, like the plot, characters, tone, style, etc. So, when I learnt that there are lots of different ways of understanding literature and that there are some really interesting and insightful approaches, it was exciting because I realised that I could develop my own approach. Studying English was about engaging with the scholarship of others, and engaging with literature yourself, and, over time, developing your own approach - your own theory. I've been, formally and informally, doing that ever since. 

familiarity and strangeness

The preface to the 1818 edition of Frakenstein says this about the main event in the story - the animation of a corpse - 'It was recommended by the novelty of the situations which it develops; and, however impossible as a physical fact, affords a point of view to the imagination for the delineating of human passions more comprehensive and commanding than any which the ordinary relations of existing events can yield.' 

In other words, the portrayal of such contrived and unrealistic events strikes more of a chord with the reader than the portrayal of everyday events would. But the portrayal of extraordinary events needs to be able to accommodate aspects of the ordinary for the reader to relate to it. On the one hand, if the story was pure fantasy, with no recognisable human feelings and developments portrayed, it wouldn't resonate with us as it does. On the other hand, if it was just about normal events that one would encounter in everyday life, it wouldn't interest us. The story moves us because we relate to the experience of the characters and it interests us because it portrays events outside our experience.

I'm reading a book at the moment which also embodies that dynamic: Invincible (2019) by Suman Rao. I think it's always the case with good novels....there's some kind of real connection with the characters and the situations...we recognise ourselves in them, and that comfortable familiarity is heightened by the tension between it and the strange or unreal aspects of the story. 

the past is another place

I heard about a conference that's happening in August on the subject of distance. Here's part of the call for papers that describes what the conference is about:

"The long eighteenth century saw the experience of cultural distance through overseas exploration, empire, travel and trade. The diverse interactions led to comparisons with other states, subjects, languages and traditions. In 2020, physical and social distance has once again become a defining feature of our society, and this virtual conference invites all to consider how our current situations can bring a new appreciation for how distance was integral in the communities and cultures of eighteenth-century society."

It captured my interest and made me want to write something on that topic. 

George Berkeley was a prominent philosopher of the 18th century. In Berkeley's, AN ESSAY TOWARDS A NEW THEORY OF VISION (1709), he writes a lot about distance and he brings it up right at the start, which shows how central it was to his essay. What's interesting is how strange (from a 21st century point of view) his idea of distance is. 

Here are the first two points in Berkeley's essay:

1. My design is to show the manner wherein we perceive by sight the distance, magnitude, and situation of OBJECTS. Also to consider the difference there is betwixt the IDEAS of sight and touch, and whether there be any IDEA common to both senses.

2. It is, I think, agreed by all that DISTANCE, of itself and immediately, cannot be seen. For DISTANCE being a Line directed end-wise to the eye, it projects only one point in the fund of the eye, which point remains invariably the same, whether the distance be longer or shorter.

It's as if the very concept of distance is something new and open to question....as if, maybe, distance could be considered a characteristic of the objects being viewed. It seems to be premised on a whole different conception of what it means to see and also what distance is - a conception in which it's rational to say that you can't see distance. To us, that seems obvious. 

Maybe it shows that the idea of distance was relatively new and was still being defined. When I look up the etymology of the word 'distance', it says that the meaning "remoteness of space, extent of space between two objects or places" is from the late 14th century. Before that, earlier in the 14th century, and as far back as 1300, it had the meaning of "a dispute or controversy, civil strife, rebellion;". 

I did some more research and found out that one of the things Berkeley is doing in his second point above, is disagreeing with Descartes. Descartes had made the suggestion (which fits more closely with our modern understanding of distance) that we can assess distance based on what we see - basically that the smaller something appears, the further away it is. Berkeley's response was - how ridiculous....you can't see distance....the same data enters the eye, however distant the object is. From our point of view, Berkeley misinterpretted Descartes - wilfully, maybe - but that's only because Descartes's view has become our reality. To put it in terms of distance, Descartes is closer to us than Berkeley, even though he's further away chronologically. 

It's fascinating the way that the pioneers of science, through their analyses, were led to view phenomena in ways that are radically different from our assumptions about those phenomena, because those assumptions had not formed yet. For example, even after publishing his Traité élémentaire de chimie (Elementary Treatise on Chemistry) (1789)  which in many ways represents the real beginning of modern chemistry, Antoine Lavoisier still believed that heat was a substance (see p 245 of The Age of Wonder (2008) by Richard Holmes). 

So, the distance between us and people who were writing in earlier centuries illuminates our assumptions. When we engage with those works, we experience a sense of cultural difference. It's a journey of discovery. 

flaws

It's been raining and I just looked out of the window at the backyard and, where there is grass, it is covered in fresh green blades with glistening droplets of water on them. It's beautiful and yet it's just an ordinary, everyday thing - water on grass. 

I wrote an essay once with the thesis that beauty is an expression of the relationship between humanity and nature. I began with, 'beauty is the complication of a rule...' or something like that, and everyone I shared it with asked, but what is the rule?....you don't explain what the rule is. But I didn't have a particular rule in mind. What I was saying is that the complication of a rule (as a dynamic) is one way to think about beauty. I read some books....Ars Poetica by Horace, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful by Edmund Burke, the poem 'Ars Poetica' by Archibald Macleish, parts of Biographia Literaria by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, especially the part about imagination, and a few others....I read all kinds of stuff, thinking about my thesis, and it seemed to me that a general theme was that beauty was the complication of a rule. 

I used to really like the idea that beauty is expressed through flaws. I remember hearing the concept of the 'flawed masterpiece' and I think the idea is that something is a masterpiece but it is flawed and the flaws mar it a bit but, because it's a masterpiece, the flaw(s) don't completely ruin it. But I like the idea that the flaws are what make it a masterpiece. I did an internet search just now, and the former seems to be the prevailing view. But I don't like that idea. I think that real masterpieces achieve a kind of perfection (which means that they are flawless), but perfection in this world is.....complicated. They're perfect in the same way that people can be perfect or an experience can be perfect - they're fully integrated and everything belongs in the picture. 

One of the things I had in mind in saying that beauty is an expression of the relationship between humanity and nature, is 'the ruin'. And the reason why I was thinking about ruins (e.g. Wordsworth's Tinturn Abbey) is because the course for which I was writing the essay was about the treatment of nature in literature. Ruins were something of a preoccupation with the Romantic era poets and artists. So, I was thinking about ruins and it occurred to me that a ruin is a collaborative work between humanity and nature. People build something and then, over time, nature turns that building into a ruin. 

It seems like all the beauty is contributed by nature. Like, when I looked at the grass with the droplets on it, I wasn't doing anything to create that. But actually, my contribution was just as great, in a way. Because I was the one who saw the beauty. I might not have even looked or not had the thought about how beautiful it was, and then that instance of beauty would not have been....instantiated (I like talking like a coder these days). 

tbr

I was thinking about it and I think the reason I liked Stacy Schiff's The Witches so much, when I didn't really feel the same way about other books about the Salem witch trials, even though I'm fascinated by the subject, is because it unfolds as a story - it has a strong narrative arc. It wasn't just information bound together to support a thesis. That's part of the reason why, as I wrote about in another blog post, Schiff is able to write abut things that to the modern mind are impossible, as if they did happen. In a standard, traditional non-fiction text, or an academic text, such techniques would be out of place. 

My Vollmann reader (Expelled from Eden) arrived. I think I need to learn to read the way academics read - how they can read 15 books and 30 articles a week - because there are so many books I want to read. Rather than give a long list, here is a list of the categories of books I want to read, with some explanation and examples:

Books about people who don't comform to social norms

One book like this that I read and enjoyed last year is, Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, and one that I'm reading/ will be reading at the moment is My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh. 

books by people who have very different views from mine

I never used to read books like that. But lately, especially in the last few months, I've become interested in reading and researching views that are different from mine. 

Difficult books

I want to read long, difficult (mostly philosophical) works, like the work of Hume, Kant, Locke, Descartes. 

books of essays and literary criticism 

My favourite literary critics are, Harold Bloom, (more recently) Slavoj Zizec, Julia Kristeva (even though I don't understand most of what she writes....like, literally no-idea-don't-understand), Mikhail Bakhtin. For essays, I like Susan Sontag. I want to read more of Gore Vidal. I also like the literary criticism of J. M. Coetzee. I think because he writes literature himself, he knows how to make theory really sing. Or, to put it in terms of what I wrote at the start of this post, he knows how to tell it as a story. 

history books

I've got quite a lot of books about history, but two that really stand out to me and that I want to read are:

The Making of the English Working Class by E P Thompson and The Pursuit of the Millennium by Norman Cohn. 

And there are lots more - novels, books about psychology, memoirs and biographies, journals of famous people, history of science, books about religion and spirituality, poetry, plays....

something new

I just ordered my first William T. Vollmann book. It's a reader with excerpts from his novels, journalism, essays, correspondence, and poetry, so I'm looking forward to reading it. 

I hadn't even heard of him until recently, when I watched a video on youtube on one of my favourite booktube channels - leaf by leaf, which is surprising because literature is one of my main interests and apparently this guy is really, really good, he's been publishing books since the 80's, and he's extremely prolific.  Here's the leaf by leaf video where he gives an overview of Vollmann's work:
WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN. He has many videos about Vollman's individual works as well. 

....and I kind of cheated. Instead of waiting to receive the book in the mail, I bought one of his books as an e-book. I really like e-books. I've been exploring project gutenberg and finding free books in lots of other places...so I've compiled quite a collection of e-books...some I just keep the links in a document, some I have the pdf, some I get on my kindle (and at the moment I usually read on my computer using the kindle app). The great thing about e-books is that you can get a lot of them for free....not just from project gutenberg and archive.org, but you can often get pdfs or other formats of e-books of even quite recently published or renowned books from different websites. But even when you pay for kindle books through amazon, they're cheaper than the hardcopy and you don't have to wait for them. The other major advantage of e-books is they are searchable, so they're great for research and writing. You can find a quote and then you can copy and paste. 

Anyway, I got the e-book of Vollmann's, The Atlas, which, as the title suggests, is a compilation of his writings about places he's been and experiences he had in those places. One of the places he writes about is Redfern. So I'm reading that one first. He writes beautifully. I'm drawn in. 

I think the best writers have a kind of dialectical mix of transparency and materiality going on. They allow the story to flow through them. They don't try to own it or spin it or impose on it. But, at the same time, it's their story - their expression. 

the way

I heard a really good explanation of the verse in the book of James where he writes that faith without deeds is dead. This is the video: The Meaning of Faith Without Works, and How We're Saved: Looking at James 2:14-26. It's by Melissa Dougherty. 

That verse, and the epistle it's part of, has bothered a lot of people, including most famously, Martin Luther, because being saved or made right with God by our faith and God's grace was so central to his teaching. He actually said that the book of James shouldn't even be in the Bible, which is kind of presumptuous, but of course Luther was presumptuous....he directly challenged what was regarded as the true Christianity of his day. 

The problem Luther had, and the problem a lot of Christians have even today, with James's message, is that it seems to contradict other important teachings in the New Testament. Especially in the books of Romans and Ephesians, we're taught that it's all about faith. We're saved because we believe and trust and rely on what Jesus did. 

But, understood correctly, as the video explains, James's teaching doesn't contradict that. As Melissa points out in the video, James was arguing against a philosophical approach called antinomianism, which holds that, because we're saved by faith and not works, once we are saved, we can just do whatever we want - literally...there's no compunction at all. 

The book of James is very practical. A lot of it is about how we should speak and behave in our lives. When he says that faith without deeds is dead, I think what he's getting at is that, if you claim to have faith, but then you're always nasty and don't care about people and just do whatever you want even if it's immoral, there's something wrong - something is amiss. 

So, the way I understand that passage now is that....we're not judged by the standard of our works...what matters is our faith, and, as a simple matter of fact, if our faith is real, it will change the way we live...it will change our behaviour, conduct, relationships, etc. If there's no reflection in our actual life, that doesn't mean we're not doing enough and we need to do more - it's not about having sufficient deeds, it's about having faith. 

It reminds me of a quote that Harold Bloom gives from a Hebrew religious text called Pirkei Avot: 'You are not required to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.'