Wednesday, February 03, 2010
you and me and everyone we know
A creative writer may have an interpretive plight unlike a reader with text in hand: the writer “reading” the invisible audience, if not living with an audacity of anticipating a specific character of mind.
Here we are, where I must trust in your graciousness toward our presence.
As someone who’s aware of most everything on the Website, you are a fiction, an idea—which can be an unbiased presumption by me inasmuch as I don’t presume anything about the sense of it all you have. I don’t project myself into the idea (point of information), because my desire is an open one: to learn from others’ views, to be surprised or enlightened by an other.
I play with you in a resonance of actual others in mind, whom I write and know do or may be reading here. That’s a surreality for us, but a common condition of textuality—a plight?—I invite.
So, the ideality of you is innocent. But it’s fair to surmise this-and-that, e.g., that you—anyone—easily see the site as an assemblage of pieces that don’t have an evident integration or thematic coherence—or available narrative weave. (It takes no ideality to surmise that!) The bunch of textual occasions—journalistic, figurative, rhetorical, and discursive—would be a pointillism without a gestalt.
It’ll all come together way down the road. My agenda is happily interrupted by advents of the days, but the agenda figures a conceptual coherence that has developed over some years, resulting from what’s been affectionately called “The Perpetual Project,” a rubric which suits my sense of living well, such that a good life gravitates around a prevailing Project.
I have a freedom of ambivalence between characterization and confession that is given up with real presence and presumption of a reader who cares about the difference. An ethic of writing and fair reading is not the same as an ethic of conversation. (The latter could do well to learn from the former, as the hermeneutical condition belongs to all experience that speaks to one.)
I console myself with confidence in my own good heart (the ethical mode of Self) that also enjoys improvisations (an “aesthetic” mode of characterization—and self-caricature).
