My apologia, for writing, for putting into words, for wielding pen on paper, placing hands on keyboard. Nadine Gordimer dispels my mistrust at the instinctive turn to writing from my childhood, from the time I traced the alphabet on paper. Writing is not about publication, about audience, about form, writing IS being for some of us humans! The word flies through space, it is bounced from satellites, now nearer than it has ever been to the heaven from which it was believed to come. But its most significant transformation occurred for me and my kind long ago, when it was first scratched on a stone tablet or traced on papyrus, when it materialized from sound to spectacle, from being heard to being read as a series of signs, and then as a script; and traveled through time from parchment to Gutenberg. For this is the genesis story of the writer. It is the story that WROTE her or him into being. It was strangely, a double process, creating at the same time both the writer and very purpose of the writer as a mutation in the agency of human culture. It was both ontogenesis as the origin and development of an individual being, and the adaptation, in the nature of that individual, specifically to the exploration of ontogenesis, the origin and development of THE individual being. For we writers are evolved for that task. Like the prisoners incarcerated with the jaguar in Borges story, The Gods Script, who was trying to read, in a ray of light which fell only once a day, the meaning of being from the marking on the creatures pelt, WE SPEND OUR LIVES ATTEMPTING TO INTERPRET THROUGH THE WORD THE READINGS WE TAKE IN THE SOCIETIES, THE WORLD OF WHICH WE ARE PART. IT IS IN THIS SENSE, THIS INEXTRICABLE, INEFFABLE PARTICIPATION, THAT WRITING IS ALWAYS AND AT ONCE AN EXPLORATION OF THE SELF AND THE WORLD; OF INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE BEING. [emphasis mine] Being here.
Posted on: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 06:40:50 +0000