fragilekeys

In lieu of posting multiple smaller entries, I’ve decided to gather on one page some of the miscellaneous musings on writing that I’ve written in the last few years. These are all very occasional pieces, sometimes quite divergent in argument and aim. None of them are really what you would call “practical,” but hopefully they offer fruit for meditation nonetheless. I’ll try to update this page when new material on the topic is produced. Note that at the bottom I’ve collected links to other writings on this site which deal more or less directly with the question of writing. Thanks for reading.

Writing is like giving birth: we cannot help making the supreme effort. But this applies to our actions in the same way. I need have no fear of not making the supreme effort―provided only that I am honest with myself and that I pay attention. ―Simone Weil

I. An Idiot for Miracles (March 21, 2017)

Writing is like spreading out into nothingness a clear, invisible, paint-like substance that upon contact with meter cools immediately, coagulating into a softbound clay image that foils meaning, or a thought-marble that harbors the bounteous silhouette of a dream. At this resistant block, you have no choice but to chisel, for it is raw and rough and an idiot for miracles. But with every stroke of your hammer, every chunk of material discarded, the strings of a cello glimmer out into the foreground, and the light vibrations so seduce you into passage that you must halt everything and paint what you hear.

II. Scripts of the Possible (September 20, 2013)

The one who writes is not he, but the one who dreams. The truth of it’s not his, but the truth of those who dream with him. Writing’s not written from the position of an actual being, but from the position of being’s possibility―the possibility of dreaming and speaking in anyone. It’s not someone’s, but anybody’s. Such is why the one who writes is never “one,” but many. Which is why anyone might hear him. No voice, no language is possible without this intermingling of the multiple in the same. And if these dreams mean anything, it’s because some multiple one dreams in them. To read them is for that multitude to be read. Singularity comes from this: that inside our words, inside our being, others are given a chance to dream and be also―to dream up their own possibility, their own speech.

Always more than ourselves, we’re equal only to the dream of we all―to this possibility of “all,” the possibility of saying “we.” Thinking’s heart beats only for this, and it’s how we dream this “we” that defines our uniqueness, makes each of us an absolute. To carry this dream―of being, of being ourselves, of being us―to the threshold of consciousness, where we touch one another without being fused, without exhausting our possibility in anything actual: this is what the dreaming writer will have always tried to do. This is what the dreaming multitude will have always been dreaming up in you.

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One can perhaps share two sorts of things: things that have just recently come to your attention and things that you’ve carried with you for a long time. Unless an informative description is attached, the recipient may not be able to tell which of the two it is: if what they’re seeing is new to the sender, too, or if they haven’t suddenly been given access to the contents of a mysterious crypt. Objects have a curious way of swallowing up vast stretches of time and space and labor and attention into neat, anonymous capsules. So one writes the date and occasion on the back of the photograph, puts one’s name on a storage box, specifying: caution, valuables, breakable. But even these notes are indifferent to whomever is unacquainted with the references. Everyone needs a storyteller to contextualize the thing, to communicate the experience it means, or at least to set the established facts in motion and unfold an interpretation that is relevant. To avoid the standard mush, an activity of selection and molding is necessary. Otherwise, the object stays wrapped up in itself, mute and distant; and the sharer disappears behind the thing shared, abandoning it naked to the world’s icy clutch.

With your average post on social media, of course, everything tends to the cool and self-explanatory. Thoughtful touches are rarely contributed, at least not until one amasses a community of users around oneself who are similarly dedicated to transforming the social media space into one of just sharing. Otherwise, it often seems like the very purpose of the apparatus is to purge such touches from the polis or to scare away those who might risk them. But it would be a mistake to blame digital culture alone for this. It is tough to add thoughtful touches in any social setting, overloaded as they are with codes of dominant language and behavior. It is not even easy in the comforts of one’s own home or among friends. Even with lovers there can be disconnects, reluctances, great incommunicables. How does one ever know what to share and when? Even when the words are blurted out, the intimate detail confessed, the reception is often disappointing. We note in the other an uninquisitiveness, disinterest, distraction, or a simple inability to relate. Ambivalence can even wipe away our desire to be exposed raw, to attain lacerating communication and shaken out of normalcy. Everywhere just sharing encounters reasons to get discouraged: no one responds, people respond superficially, detailed responses get forgotten; there is much fatigue but no progress; no one learns anything, the crux of the matter is never fully conveyed; and so many gaps remain, so many petty assertions infect intersubjective space, so much misplaced superiority and ingratiating waste, so much reactive selfishness. The result is that sharing itself, and the hopes we place in it, degrade. Afraid of rejection or incomprehension, we forget our boldness and consent to a hushed mode that is safe but alone, while the mind rages.

Alas, it takes time and attention to find the justice in this affair and continue with it despite its many perils. As Bataille once said, giving voice to the void encountered in the trials of human communication: “Experience itself had torn me to shreds and my inability to respond finished tearing them.” Even the semblance of transparency is forbidden. Nothing shall diminish the earnestness of the divulgence. But no one who has not begun the long journey of experimenting with this “inability to respond” knows to what extent it prevails over every furtive success. The impossibility inherent here is the foundation for the most creative sendings and the most earnest receptions, in a word: of loyalty. For justice to be had in sharing, the enigma of what is shared demands its rights. The mystery demands to remain. Children know this and delight in the mysticism of sharing, absorbed in the  wonders that attend them. What if adulthood was the art of childhood regained, made excellent? What would that do to our serious discourse on the world? In any case, there must be an ethic to “posting,” lest the social sphere devolve into a quasi-automatic circulation of impersonal information, a sphere from which all sensitive souls are driven to the margins, ostracized and ignored. There must be something like a “just share” that does not imply the sacrifice of the soul, that strives to make no false or careless move, no rash or crude opinion, that does not weigh the evidence of the world or try to measure up to its cleverness, but exposes itself, at the limit of what it can recognize and formulate, to a community of strangers―the first best hope of a redemption that will ultimately hinge on their ability to be examples of “just sharing” for each other.

These remarks in mind, let’s turn to the two types initially mentioned: things that bespeak the new find, which could potentially enter the chest of treasures, and those that signify an everlasting acquisition, which at each new encounter reaffirm their relevance for our life.

Attached to the first is the excitement of discovery and the need to proclaim it. Social beings that we are, we cannot separate our enlightenment from that of others, so we are sure that whatever strikes us will surely strike someone else, too. One broadcasts out the song, quote, news, or image in hopes that it will catch on as suddenly and unexpectedly elsewhere as it did for us. Our surprise must be shared, for we have faith that it will be a surprise for others; in sharing, our own surprise is fulfilled. This is perhaps at the root of our love for teaching and spreading knowledge: it is only when we send back out what we have received that we ourselves fully receive it. Thus the urgency of the first type, which strives partially for our own wholeness, partially for the wholeness of the social whole. Our reasoning goes like this: whatever we have learned is something others should learn for themselves too, whatever has inspired us could also inspire them, and it is our duty to solicit their attention (or concern, indignation, curiosity, etc.) for the sake of universal interest and its edification. Aiding us here are the revelations themselves, which are by nature contagious. Their seductions overflow the limitations of past knowledge with the force of evidence, charm or truth. The sharer adheres passionately to revelation’s logic of bloom, like a child’s first musings on the growth of plants. One’s aim here, at least, is to make it possible for anyone else to be embraced by the beauty, not just of the revelation, but of transmission itself, too, a source of joy in sociality, in the release of thought and emotion and spirit into new materials, which is essential to the expansion of a rich human culture―for without the chance of crossing paths, no one would ever travel.

But then there are the things that haunt us. Far from beckoning us to chase them, it is they that chase us, even invisibly. They recur because they can never leave us: poems, videos, songs, quotations, anecdotes, persons whose spirit or mode are so deeply ingrained into our unconscious that one can never tell where they stop and our conscious thinking begins. These subcutaneous relics support the unspoken principles of our behavior and creativity. They accompany us, aide us, but also blind us, lead us astray. Thus is formed our irreplaceable singularity: after the fact, in dealing with these indelible marks, scars, tattoos of a life. We cherish them with a fatal attraction, knowing that the depth of our affection for them will die with us; and that only they, our partner in mad descent, know the heights to which we have carried each other. With them we shared nights in quiet wonder, giving thanks for them in solitude, alone with the universe yet linked up with it eternally through this object, that word, this memory or sound. At the same time, we are not always so meditative and often lack the time to reflect deliberately upon these fellow travelers. We forget them even though they remain unforgettable, having left their trace in all our words and actions in a way we could never articulate to ourselves or to anyone else. About these things, one does not hold long discourses except with great difficulty, with a mixture of mortal bitterness and endless gratitude. For we know these things, as much as they stick with us, are also lost irretrievably, for they have always already been thoroughly incorporated into the dreamscape that is our being or spirit―which, for better or worse, withdraws in the end from all obvious or immediate sociality.

To share from out of the mystery of our own crypts such things, then, is to share a secret no one else will ever know. It is to accept the silent, confessional foundation of our own truth, lodged as it is in a million irretrievable corners of our history. One lacks entirely the exuberance of the proselytizing mode, for the only urgency here is the urgency of eternity. The goal is no longer to reveal a truth or spark interest, but to testify to something beyond fact or fiction. Put more strongly, one would like to resurrect a body, to let be seen the “ashes of our vital praxis,” from which something like our spirit would rise. What it bears is the melancholic certainty that there will be no direct contagion here, nothing “viral,” nothing that captivates any great mass all at once. The importance of one’s life-long bearing of this thing, too, will never be replicated; at best, someone else will incorporate it anew, but now in a way so unique to them that the experiences remain incomparable. It does not catch on, but carries us up. It does not extend unless it merges with us and brings us with it. It says that, between us and it, there was no distance, that we and it remain inseparable. To share such a thing is to share our entire creature, to grant a lens into our widest scope. Our heart looks at its heart, and its heart looks at ours. The other who stands in these crosswinds, receiving what is shared, is a stranger―not a voyeur, since the true drama is concealed to vision, nor a danger, since what rises is indestructible, but a friend, we could say: someone who will be caught up in our body, which they let free. For if they choose to stand there, we know that they are already being lifted up with our heart into a common one. We know then that there is no longer I, nor you, nor we, but just this Thing in love: the just share, rising, shining, unperishable.

―March 20, 2017

Usually what annoys us about a horror movie is the stupidity of the humans involved. A dreadful curiosity lures them to discover an Evil that paralyzes their reason and leads them into ill-advised, desperate, frenzied action. Many plots could be averted, and the story ended, if only they had left the thing alone and not given it any attention. But Evil doesn’t leave humans that option; it haunts, invades, seduces them into contact, or imposes it. They climb the stairs looking for the source of that strange screeching noise. They cannot avert their gaze from the mirror that tricks them into killing themselves. They cannot leave unresearched the anomalous substance that threatens to invade them. Or they simply miss the clues, the discovery comes too late, and before they know it they are in Evil’s hands despite themselves. We smack our foreheads with frustration as the foolhardy character makes the exact wrong move and, as they should have predicted, gets their head sliced clean off.

Our annoyance is a way of asking, How could they be so stupid? They had it coming! But here one rightly objects that, were you faced with the real threat of a slashing, you too would probably not act so rationally. Suspension of disbelief will reach out to accept any monster, but we are not as patient with the monstrosity of human unreason. This shows to what extent we expect people faced with Evil to act as if the Evil did not affect them, as if its power ought to be bracketed and overcome through heroic action and the best strategic choice. Our concern as viewers is perhaps not even primarily that the character survive (it is perhaps rare that a horror movie genuinely endears us to them, though the best ones do), but that the characters fight for their survival in a convincing way and do nothing too irrational to jeopardize it. Whereas, when it comes to the Evil thing itself, we expect irrationality. We do not begrudge it when it exploits human stupidity―though, admittedly, we are less impressed by an Evil whose task is made easy by humans than an Evil that overpowers even our greatest defenses.

The trouble is that, on the one hand, we stupidly want to discover the Evil and see it in action in all the gruesome detail, we want to see it express its power. On the other, we want humans to deal with Evil intelligently, even if ultimately it doesn’t make a difference. By this criterion, it should be no surprise that a professional is often introduced into the mix to supplement the dire scenario with a glimmer of hope. A psychologist, an exorcist, a detective, a paranormal export, a militant―perhaps on a divine mission, perhaps not―anyone who can pursue the Evil “from outside” or “from above,” somehow rationally (if also stupidly). In this character’s capacity as expert or leader, they differ from the common person who is too overwhelmed with fear and fails to handle the crisis adequately. This reflects our desire to see the Evil understood and conquered, even in the most hopeless, fruitless and doomed manner. Above all, not to behave entirely stupidly…

The professional is the that member of the Evil-plagued party who can maintain an ideal of rational, or perhaps a spiritual distance (often modeled on the battle between Christ and demonic forces). This is a viewing distance that allows a gain in clarity, even if the action that must follow requires improvisation, risk, life-endangerment, and so on. As a narrative device, the professional works so well in film because it doubles, guides and mimics the action of the viewer (though we as observers maintain the “uppermost” position, the most rational and “unafraid,” such that our willingness to view is already a conquering). Submitted to the horror scene but fighting for the distance of an investigator―often driven by a crazy curiosity, an obsessed determination―, the professional makes decision about values, about what to save and leave behind, about why the Evil is worth confronting and what a meaningful response to it might be (if there are any).

Now, it doesn’t have to be a professional per se, but there is always a sort of becoming-investigator or becoming-scientist at play in a good character when he or she is confronted with an unimaginable horror. I believe this bears witness to a general human tendency, something probably to be admired no matter how haphazard and abortive its campaigns. Generally speaking, whenever this element of knowing is lacking, the story is limited to the hysteria of characters whose stakes are personal, familial, or humanitarian, but chaotic because undirected and overly passional. These ‘pathological’ influences are what the professional is able, their heart racing, to suspend. And we know their investigatory stance is often tested directly by the Evil itself, its way of protecting itself from being unmasked or known. Indeed, the one with (or striving after) a removed, sober perspective is often the one destined to get most caught up in the combat. The one whose full entanglement with Evil is finally revealed to them as the cipher of their destiny. Those characters are weakest who show little more than fear and rage, who fall quickly in their desperate attempts to fight Evil directly. (This leads us to doubt the strength, gravity, or believability of that particular Evil―as if any Evil that didn’t call for an increase in knowledge in its challenger wasn’t worth hearing about, and a waste of a movie.)

The terrible attraction of the great horror film is an Evil that we cannot not want to know about, even if it is in the end unstoppable, or stoppable only for a time. But that Evil is unstoppable is, in the end, unacceptable for humanity. We can see in the horror genre a dynamic allegory for our condition as beings endowed with knowledge of good and evil who, nonetheless, do not do the good we want to do, and do do the evil we do not want to do. Barring the notion that we are innately evil at heart, we know and over time have progressed in knowing that Evil forces, within and without, can be unmasked and known, seen and overcome. But time has brought the fall of religion as our moral measuring stick for understanding Evil. Juridical and governmental aparatuses, filling the void of religion’s loss of authority, do not answer the question of Evil but control Evil by force and punish its occurrence. We have witnessed just to what degree humans can persecute and kill each other, beyond all imaginable boundaries or rules of engagement. Our times seem characterized by the need and obligation to pass through Evil in a raw, naked, horrifying way, not only collectively but personally―to stare into the abyss, as Nietzsche put it, taking care that the abyss does not stare back. Very often, an abyss does stare back. What if this was the moment of selection, the moment of progress in knowledge? We understand now that the entire question is reflected in our inner mirror and plays out in the struggle of our soul.

Not only military and intelligence experts, politicians, priests and other leaders, but we too are called to be experts in the ways of handling Evil in our own confrontation with the world’s horrors and those buried deep in our minds and hearts. We too feel the pressure of the professional to stand back and appraise, investigate, ponder and put together, if only to stay sane and ward off hopelessness. So we invent countless strategies of interpreting, preventing, redirecting, and explaining Evil. And yet, with each murder or mass shooting or bombing, Evil confirms its overwhelming character, its apparent unstoppability. Often we are reduced to tears like a family caught in a broom closet while the villain lurks in their living room. And yet we do not give in. We fight our way out at risk of life and limb, sacrificing everything if it means the Evil will be understood and conquered. Even if our direct goal is to save those closest to us, the implications of our deeds is almost metaphysical. We prove the value of hope and knowledge, their participation and ours in the Good.

The horror movie reflects this struggle between fear and overcoming, giving us a jolting image to prompt our reflections and to take stock of the falsity or “artificiality,” as Rex Styzens puts it, of the special effects that produce terror. I don’t want to give the impression that I mean all scares are false. My point is philosophical in nature, emphasizing the need to recognize the falsity and illusion of Evil where it would try to drown us in its confusion and paralyze us. Of course, however artificial the means and motives of fear, however base, misleading, and obdurate it is, in the real world it produces real violence, injury and death. And Evil perpetuates itself through thought-images like a virus, duplicating its wrath in new spheres. Perhaps horror movies teach us something here, perhaps not. Representation works for the cognitive response, but the affective runs into deeper spaces and complexities, harder to understand and express. While movies can conjure these elements of emotion as well, nothing compares to a real-life situation of horror. I share with Rex a “mute admiration” for those who survive it. I wish for them a life of recovery from their traumas and protection from the abreaction into evil behaviors themselves.

I won’t say more on these matters of Evil in society, except to voice a hunch: In the long run, the best way to address it is to assume the fullness of our confrontation with Evil in the deepest recesses of ourselves; to question our own habits and views down to the most granular detail; and to exorcise all the demons that possess us―the automatic reactions, narrow desires and minor violences that generate an atmosphere of combat, vengeance, jealousy and covetousness in society. The point is to see where we are doing violence and what we can do about it. My hope is only that we learn how to brave Evil in our own spheres however we can, inside and out, to root it out―a very difficult task, especially if we take the investigation sincerely into all our thoughts and habits.

Once it is accepted that each of us is called to become a professional in the matter of Evil (whether or not it is “supernatural”), it can no longer be a matter of a straightforward moral education or prescriptions. Nothing outside of us can guide us all the way here, for gaining lived knowledge is essential. Sometimes this means more than observing and reflecting. We feel and incarnate evil feelings in ourselves, feel them fully so as to examine them and to stop acting upon them. In the process we gain compassion for those who do evil, since we see how we are complicit in their exercise. As we know (and as movie plots sometimes show), it is often by befriending the threatening source that we gain our understanding of it and are able to help it out of its confusion, liberate it from the suffering it has. This is the hopeful vision advanced by the courageous humanity displayed in horror movies. One wonders if it isn’t Evil that is most scared by the Evil in them; and perhaps they remain Evil because they cannot or refuse not to know anything about it, preferring to remain vicious, unfeeling, and brutal in spite of everything, ignoring feedback and the need to observe, reflect, and release. Whatever their situation, the horror movie shows that it is humans who are in the best position to enter that practice or profession.

Evil in the movies is obviously not always like a wound in need of healing. As in the real world, it is often portrayed as fundamentally senseless and chaotic, even if it exhibits a high strategic intelligence for attaining its rabid aims. But even here we notice, the Evil thing is subject to its own cravenness and insanity, the baseness of its drives and attacks. It is not clear, in many cases, how a knowing and careful influence is supposed to overcome the fear it generates. The possibility that we will die―by approaching it or just as a random victim―is never alleviated. But knowledge and perspective still helps us survive, even when these cannot penetrate the hard shell of brutality, idiocy and inconscience that shields Evil from its contact with the Other, with a beyond of division and mutual devourment. For it is always by a false understanding of our intimacy and intrication with the Other that we devolve into separateness and disconnection. What we do know is that this devolution leads to horror, which should be enough to accept the call.

Since I’m writing this on Halloween, let me close with a story. One year, probably 2009, I decided to wear for the occasion a hideous mask misshapen like an alien and bleeding from cuts like a slasher victim. I put something under the left shoulder of my woodsman flannel to give the appearance of a hump. Though not elaborate in construction, I was able continually to jump-start any of my friends who looked my way not expecting to see this face. Even to wear it casually in the room unnerved. It quickly became an exciting, powerful game for me. That evening, after partying a bit, we decided to go out to the bars. What grabbed a hold of me then was strange and memorable. I could not step out into the street―the Ped Mall of Iowa City, where hundreds of other students in outfits gathered―without staggering and playing the part. The game escalated. I started lumbering hunched through the lines of crowds waiting to enter bars and bantering, growling in a very low voice and loudly breathing with great disturbance. Through the eye holes in my mask, I could tell that many around me, especially some females, were made very uncomfortable at my presence. Looks and glares, some fascinated but many disapproving, met my menacing poses. I felt I had actually become suspicious and threatening in their eyes. But I kept on with it for at least an hour, until I found myself wandering alone in an alley, still committed to the Evil acting-out―until something snapped and I “woke up,” stood up straight, took off the mask, chuckled and started walking normally. But inside I was very disturbed at how I had gotten there, how I could take the delusional image so far.

Perhaps Evil is a little like this. Worn like a costume for some purpose―and this can begin in innocent inconscience, however twisted it later becomes―it gives us a feeling of power and control. It brings us attention, however horrified and disgusted. And it is full of passionate abandon, a sort of trance-activity, unreflective, uninhibited, aggressive, free and somehow pleasurable. But inside it is terrifying. Perhaps Halloween is about inhabiting the Evil figure from the inside, playing it out for a night to neutralize its attraction over us. Yet there are probably costumes we wear daily that could be discarded. These are the costumes of our own fear, false scares that hold us bound to scary images. No doubt it is not easy to snap out of the trance of violence, divisiveness and aggression, but there are certainly opportunities to try. The calmness of the expert is not at odds with a quick jump into courageous, decisive action. If anything is certain about them professional, it is that they have seen what Evil has in it and know it is not Good. Their fear is not absolute; it doesn’t control the response, for the fear is relative to a gap in perspective, in our acknowledgement of what we know about Evil’s extent. This doesn’t make it any easier to handle, its vanquishing any quicker. Nothing guarantees success, and the professional remains much in the dark about much. But in seeking to overcome, dispelling ignorance with knowledge, we prove that the scare must be held false, and that Evil need not win when it is possible for humans to understand it.

―Halloween, 2016 and 17

Note related posts:
Unspeakable ― on the pain of the event, written during Sandy Hook
Boredom & Terror ― on the “wish for explosive pain”
Thinking the Gift of Death ― review of Fernando’s The Suicide Bomber