veridiction:s

The problem with writing is this: it is like a gifted horse, and still you should look it in the muzzle, even dissect its guts, and then put it together again for you to work.

It is given and it is a gift. Not as in a talent or something that only a few have. Unlike horses everyone is given this little but wild beast of writing. You can’t buy it in the store. And often enough, you can’t get a different one. A good writer of fiction cannot suddenly decide to write poems. An academic writer cannot switch to short columns for newspapers. Knowing to write a thing is not knowing to write everything.

Those who are and those we consider accomplished writers in any category, have more or less tamed their writing beasts. Better, or worse, they have cut it into peace, put it back together and succeeded in giving back its life! They can ride it and get around. They are master, and still without luck they would have had no chance. They are given a second gift. If they have a horse that is fit for racing, they must be lucky enough to have an accessible race track just in their surroundings. The thirst of a word-lover for trivial alliterations can turn out to be deliver entertainment to thousands. It always takes a certain privilege to be able to develop one’s particular gift. This is maybe what I want to say.

Trivial maybe, but with writing it is a problem. With all our different writing beasts, we do always end up competing in the same kind of competition that is only good for one particular kind of creature. We call it academic writing. It is not so much a disaster to get a talent for aphorisms or poems to write academically as it is to have it write in that formal style before, with emphasis here on chronological order, the horse is confidently trained for its main tendencies, disciplining its foremost and strongest passions and obsessions. Maybe a person can become good in writing formally, but if she like to jump around for physical satisfaction of her bodily impules, she will never get to writing for which she is somehow certificated.

If a pony is lined to race with running horses! The horse and the rider will know from the first moment of looking at the competitors, the length of their legs: I am not made for this. And if no know is given as to other skills, other ways of being and being accomplished, the it is easy to think: I am a loser. I am good for nothing; Nothing, meaning, for all that which the duo knows it is good for. And so if they are not aware of this other practice, this other show, this other purpose for horses, they could only despair, or keep running in hopeless determination that ‘only doing you best matters.’

Common knowledge is what we attribute to Albert Einstein: no to judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree. Yet we send our kids to school, and to college and university, and, whatever they learn, we hammer on ‘standardized testing’. That is, even though the young humans are most probably vastly different in how they get in touch with the world, different in what brings them into life and makes them enthusiastic, we still hammer on judging them by the same measure that should not have to do with their specific nature. Thus we repeat after Einstein and after that think it is still fair to just do otherwise.

Well, that may happen to be fair, for example with algebra the basic knowledge of which better be common to all. But take again the example of writing, even creative writing, that academic program made up for those who want to write non-academically! The problem with this writing is that we don’t even have sorted out neat categories of it. Even if we have categories of fiction and non-fiction, proza and poetry, and even detailed subdivisions though not without ongoing discussions about their propriety, nothing can work here to prescriptively exclude or condemn the gift of an exotic and even incorrect young one. Maybe what I want to say is this: that even if there is a person who cannot make sentences at all but put words one after the other, not only there is meaning in such a listing of words, since it is impossible for anyone to be completely arbitrary with speech production, but that it can be judged only after it has been encouraged and developed so that we can recognize its accomplished shape. If we write off a wild beast, even after years of trying to tame it, then still, it is our failure to sculpt it, not the beast’s. It will even be the beasts success who has resisted us succesfully and retained it raw wildness.

We are far removed from common and uniform standards of writing. For this reason we have to accept the raw and wild style that exist out there. Writing is not yet completely domesticated, and maybe happily so. What we need to culture is not the method of disciplining of our young to fit within the few categories we think exists, but at least just as much our capacity to listen to and read those text that in the first place seem incoherent, incomprehensible, or lacking in vocabulary and style. This are of emphatic and empathetic reading is the more important as it widens our capacity to grasp meanings beyond standardized manners of communication. It increases our confidence in dealing with new unknowns, wild beasts that we, before, never thought to encounter. Wild beasts or, for that matter, re-surging gods like Gaia whom we have to learn to deal with anew.

The number of recognized practices organized around the power of this beast of writing, is nowhere near to capturing the diversity of actual writing tendencies, of word arts! Just think of how many potential Joyces, those who are savvy with pronunciation and dialects on paper, more than they are talented with their reference to clear and distinct ideas, are put off by formal judgment and education. After years of schooling, how many graduates have stopped even writing in their diaries because they are made to feel inadequate about their capacity to write ‘formally’? Yes, they lack in skills, as everyone does who is a student. But why not attend to the joy of writing as much as we attend to discipline? And how many pupil, who later become students, have in fact had proper encouragement and education in writing? How many individuals, after having been ‘corrected’ for their grammar, spelling, and having received vague commentary on their style, have quit writing because they expect no further response as to their content and meaning? How many students have come to deplore writing because no teacher has cared to place informal writing next to the flat styles of the ‘communication discipline’. There is not even much care to separate the styles of communication writing, rid of all discursive specificity, from scientific styles, which can only live through that specificity. Too often is scientific writing confused with the registerless ‘informative’ style. How qualified are we then to judge? Aren’t just repeating the examples with know of our masters and want to see ourselves repeated without really knowing why our examples are better? How many students, having been implied that sufficient writing is reproducing the likes of current examples, don’t not why they should keep reiterating empty words after they have received the diploma’s? (And how can many find satisfaction in merely repeating their masters with docility without themselves becoming masters of their creations?)

How many wild beasts on paper have rotten away without ever getting the chance to see what shape they can accomplish after some nourishing and polishing evolution? It is our obligation to give any gift a chance (at least for anyone who still thinks that grace is sacred and the most sacred thing is grace) and not give it final judgment before we have properly unwrapped it, examined it, brought it to it full potential, and understood it. Chew on every word and you will the master of telling it exactly as it should.