“Write a book, write a book, write a book”. It is getting a bit tiresome, to have a friend or two, who keep telling me this, for some godforsaken reason. I wonder why they have been asking me to take up such cumbersome work. Perhaps there is something wrong with me, that I cannot see, but others can.
I have a friend who is indeed a writer of scholarly articles on ancient history. He is well known, fairly respected by his peers, and is published worldwide in numerous peer reviewed journals.
It terrifies me, when I consider his preoccupations and predicaments. To what torture, must he put himself, in order to maintain internationally accepted, clearly legible, and easy to understand language? Perhaps it must all be scientific, dialectical, discursive, documentary, archival, etc. Language that is supposedly “correct”, having been filtered through the mesh of rules listed in the “Oxford, and Chicago Style Manual(s)”.
Writing style is a redundant concept, I say!
The greatest of writers have often written master works of incoherrent gibberish. Take Finnigan’s Wake as an example, or the impenetrable wall of wieghted words, in the great pennings, of the German philosopher, GWF Hegel. As well, Samuel Beckett, and Albert Camus have made their marks in the domain of absurd narratives.
Without incoherrent texts, that may contain invisible, and yet ever present strains of the author’s own insanity, the world of literature, as we know it, would hardly have moved beyond metaphysics, or myth, or fiction.
The pontificial nature of Grammar is scary. Grammar personified would, in my mind, imaginably be like a disgruntled old man, fixed in his ways, perpetually hurling tardy regulation at writers.
With phonetics, linguistics, and interpretation, one can never be so sure of one’s self. As the old joke goes — how can you be Sassure of yourself? Linguistic ambiguity exists, and it extends far beyond the realm of text.
All this critical theory, that thinkers have thought up, has piled up into landfills of golden ideologies (with creamy turd polish, and sparking finesse); atop which, stand the guardians of discourse, who survey the lands of the leity, gazing downward. The guardians gaze at us as they perch themselves securely atop piles of reviews, analyses, and ratings; hurling populations of unsuspecting readers into harangues about critical value and the historical accuracy of texts. Most of us innocent readers hardly ever know what it takes to write, given that reading and writing are two completely different realms.
From their elevated benches of academic scholisticism, atop libraries, archives, and other such industrial storage facilities of ideology; these guardians emit a lighthouse like ray of wisdom, that we must follow.
Landfills of acedemic superiority grow (on autopilot mode), where the yellow fog of ignorance, and of bliss, may rub it back gently, against the writing on the wall.
Let us not go then, you and I, where writers are criticised, and analysed like a fumble in a fable.
Do we need a recycling facility for all that trash, that we have dumped in the trashcan of ideology, and so on? Sniff!
No, that wasn’t an old Slovanian joke!
Oh, but wait a minute, on the other side of the global intellectual spectrum, the nemesis of academia ‐ “the Internet’ has intruded our discursive spaces like never before, we are indeed recycling a lot of shit on our phones, in a continuous loop. So that’s pretty cool, don’t you think? Or is it?
That aside, if you truly wish to write a book, you should probably know that — you may make a mixtape, but not a mistake, if at all, you want your book to be taken seriously by anybody.
The thing about mistakes is that, contrary to common belief, they infact, and indeed, are the true harbingers of change in the realm of literature.
When a language travels across geographies, its encounters with the phonetic variations, and the uncertainty of meaning(s) of words in other languages, often lead to unexpected modifications in the words within its own lexicon.
If change is good, mistakes must be too.*
*Errata: if change is good, the study of linguistics has a good future, because nowadays, more and more people are using mobile apps as language learning tools, and in such a scenario, mistakes are bound to be made along the way.
Mistakes are the locus of learning.
Infact, I’m reminded of an old joke about jazz music — “There are no mistakes in Jazz. If you believe that everything you play is a mistake, then all notes you play are equal, therefore, nothing is a mistake, coz mistakes are nothing, but a big fat nothing!”
Perhaps there will be a day that this will become true in literature as well.
(Shhh! It’s already true in the literature that is being churned online).
No wonder, nihilists, trolls, and shitposters etc. are great improvisors who are adept at scribbling unsolocited jargon day by day. Staring into the void of incoherrence has its benefits. It keeps the burden of legitimacy at an arm’s length. But be warned, staring too long into the abyss may lead to scyzophrenia, psychosis, and other such so called dysfunctions (which may in turn, lead to the delusion that the void is also staring back).
n.b. we know too well that something like this actually happened to Frederich Nietzsche in his later life.
I sometimes think of Nietsche’s sad predicament, just like one would about the martyrdom of our lord and saviour Jesus Christ, who gave his life for our sins. Perhaps Nietzsche sacrificed his mind for mindlessness (that philosophers keep chasing as if it is something real).
Nietsche is as dead as God, we have killed him with our doomscrolling habits. And although the abyss that he pointed us towards, continues to shamelessly exist and stare back. Scroll, scroll, scroll… the next comment awaits your gaze. This in itself is symbolic of his sacrifice, further proven by the fact that he has attained a kind of quasi sainthood in the world of modern trolls who occupy social media spheres, never ceasing to like, dislike, comment, and share the endless rivers of public opinion.
The path to greatness is chock-a-block full of mixtakes*, and mistapes*.
Mixtake: (from English “mix” and “take”) — a mistake that occurs in a language due to the influence of another language, and it’s phonetics, thereby creating new misspelled words, within the lexicon of the former. “Mix” refers to mixing of languages; and “take” refers to words taken from another language.
Linguists are imaginably the jazz musicians of philosophy. Imagine if you will, for an instant, that Ferdinand deSassure and Charlie Parker were to be put in the same room!
Mistape: (from English “mis” and “tape”) — a mixtape of very bad music, a bad anthology, a poor playlist, a very boring evening with a friend who has terrible music taste (mistaste), a YouTube upload of a cover band concert.
I appeal to the musicians of the world to stop playing in cover bands. Playing a cover is doing an injustice to the very musician you are covering, becasuse there is no way you can give the listener the exact same thrill that the original artist gave.
Why hide your own voice behind the words of others? The world is eager to listen to what you have to say, and not what you have to repeat, but was originally uttered by another.
IMHO, cover bands are just like the Xerox machines of the so called music industry. Why be a Xerox when you can be the genuine artice?
Write original music:
“Write a song, write a song, write a song”.
But don’t write a fucking book. That is some cumbersome shit!
If profanity can be used, it must be used. The great Marcell Duchamp one said something like — “when you learn a new language, you often start with the bad words first”. (That is so fucking true).
Profanity is the locus of learning.
The ethics that my parents impatred, kept me away from using profanity well into my teens. What a waste of years that could have been better, had I only been able to use profanity as a self defence, as a catharsis, or as free speech. Nowadays, children start young, ready with mobile phones in hand, and many folks of my generation secretly envy them.
My father once explained to me, that it is categorically imperative not to use any “foul language” whatsoever, ever in life. Bless the old man. One must live, he elaborated, by the belief in the greater good; one must always act, only by the maxim that each and every action must have the intrinsic ability of being a universal law.
I have failed my father, not just by my willingness to frequently and sporadically bring forth some fucking profanity into action, but in many other promises that he made me make as well.
In any case, I often can’t follow what Kant writes, so I have no problems in accepting my incomprehension, and disbelief of continental European ethics. The halls of erudition are locked for persons of lesser etiquette and finesse such as myself.
But then, in order to write with finesse, there is the ethical question of how to form a condusive relationship between the writer and the reader?
“Relationships are built”, but with some of us, there are polarities within one’s mind, betwixt which, relationships are impossible to exist. Some of us fail to have a balanced relationship with ourselves, let alone “others” (including the reader).
We fail to establish a conscious relationship between the separate aspects of our very “selves”.
Ego, id, and superego are always at odds with each other, constantly in conflict, struggling to subdue the others, and in effect, piling up Fruedian dungheaps that will one fatal day, only erupt like a psychological Mt. Vesuvius – with angry lava that flows over ones entire body and soul, in a matter of minutes; and traverses through the theatre halls and the alleyways of stress, anxiety, narcissism, and manic depression.
Not everyone has an Oedipus complex, you know?
Some suffer far worse, as they are brought up on a constant nourishment of religion and ritual, from the very day they are born. In Asian cultures, parents are often equated with gods. The images and words of religion, are to many, second nature.
The Image of God – is to many the platonic Ideal, that is manifest, constantly gleaming at us — as the primal focus of existance, a ghost (holy) within the superego, from the start till the end.
For some, the Lacanian mirror stage is one, wherein the mirror reflects the image of God.
I am Thou!
Am I Thou?
That is so, that is thus.
Such is the complexity of those, who place their ancestors in an entirely ethical and religious framework. It is but one that has been upheld for millenia, and has been provided to all, for free, by religion, by parentage, by legacy, and inheritance.
When it comes to forming a relationship with the reader, we must not forget, that this very relationship has led to a lot of chaos in the world of literature.
The fourth wall, breaks on its own in a world of free speech, free opinion, and global communications. Moreover, it us broken most effectively — by the rhetoric of god damned profanity.
Only a few best sellers, throughout the history of literature, have ever really been effective in forming solid (and everlasting) relationships with their readers (e.g. The Torah, The Holy Bible, The Holy Quran, The Bhagvad Gita, The Tao Te Ching etc. Just to name a few). These relationships may be a benefit if taken individually; but collectively as organised religion, they nothing to be proud of, in all honesty — these relationships have led us to interpretations, reinterpretations, misinterpretations, appropriations, misappropriations etc.
There are many readers; therefore many interpretations, therefore disagreements, thereby arguements, discontent, disinheritances, and disputes — and henceforth cycles and cycles of continual conflict are regurgitated by our need to have a relationship with “text”.
Why form a relationship with the reader, if you genuinely wish peace on earth?
Remain stoically disjointed with readers’ expectations and shenanigans. Steer clear – away from Foucauldian prisons of pedagogy, peer pressure, and the systemic literary fascism that style manuals want to impose on society.
Be a modern Hermes Trismagistus – thrice majestic, majestic in your abstinance from societal pressures; majestic in your non-cooperation, and your conscientious objection against writing; and majestic in your satyagraha against egocentric entitlements, with an absolute insistance of the truth that — writing sucks balls.
Not writing a book will be a genuinely stoic contrubution to humanity. It may even be a categorical imperative that you could practice and be proud of!
You see, we have only gotten started on why writing a book isn’t a very good idea. Infact, agreeing to do so, could be quite a perilous promise.
Readers may expect to enjoy your words. And, not every one can write enjoyable things.
Apart from that, writing a book has its consequences that many are unaware of. Many good writers have been called “vermins” by very society they wrote about. Ask Hunter. S. Thompson about his fallout with the Hells Angels, and you will see that I’m neither kidding, nor loosely using the term “vermin”.
Once you publish a book, you cannot change your mind and take your words back (except for Ludwig Wittgenstein, he can do anything he wants, we still don’t know what really happened to him between “Tractatus…” and “…Investigations”, but we speculate a lot about it, to this day).
Apart from Wittgenstein, it is still true for the rest of humanity, that words once published may not be easily retracted, because retraction is a painfully slow torture of apologies, and explanations about one’s own insanity (again, apart from Wittgenstein of course, because the world sympathises with his disability to distinguish between pictures and words, and his insistance that meaning is more present in actions than words).
The limits of language only make the case stronger for the limits of literature.*
*I’m not Sassure why I wrote the above sentence! Nevermind, what’s done is done. I could hardly retract the errors of my ways.
Being a published author is certainly dangerous because it may tie you down to your own whipping post. You will once and for all doomed to be known for your writing — as that wo/man who wrote such and such book.
Just like Gregor Samsa, was tied to the bed with his sudden inability to wake up, flip on his back, and stand up, in order to return to normalcy. Due to his sudden transformation (metamorphosis) into a vermin, even his friends and family gave up on him, and moved away.
Legend has it that Franz Kafka himself, grew vermin wings at some point in life, as he wrote letters to a small girl who happened to lose her doll in a park. What came of it all in the end, besides pointless blogs, facebook posts, trivia, and other such brain pickings, about Kafka’s life — musings of other writers that we tend to consume, and regurgitate, on a daily basis via social media feeds, and what have you?
Literature being diluted, distilled into electronic artifacts of consumption and distribution; it is becoming flavoured by opinion, modified by media, and translated into world languages in an ever churning machine that produces manufactured semantics that is palletted, curated, simplified for industrial scale consumption. Depraved of its essence, is a definite and irreversible (often unintelligible) manifests of modern social media druven commodification of thought. The merry go round of online communications, user generated content, topical forums, wiki cults etc. defines our reading habits in the twenty first century.
The mountain of (mis)information that we trek upon daily, is yet another virtual landfill of misinterpretations and speculations, that are often far too inductive (not necessarily deductive) in their reasoning. Criticism, meta criticism, critical thought, theory, analyses, meta-analyses of great written works etc. — all this and more floats endlessly in the overflowimg sewage of modern media.
Would it be far fetched to think of the content creation industry, as a hyperactive sky that casts it’s impressions upon us, just like that (perhaps grey or ochre) sky that was once etherised by Elliot like a patient on the table?
Songs of innocence have been lost to the cacophony of waves upon waves of unsolicited opinions, that burst out continusly, in real time; like millions of cancerous warts on the belly of our information highways.
Om Shanti, Shanti, Shanti!
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” – Ludwig Wittgenstein
Instead of aspiring to write and put one’s self in peril’s path, I would rather just trudge along sluggishly through life, reading the words of the prophets that are written on the subway walls, and tenement halls, as they whisper the sounds of silence.
Let us, just for the sake of exercise, draw a character sketch of a modern writer.
How about this —
A greying woman (or man), with beige baggy pants, a floral shirt and a pair of formidable glasses; with a laptop, and a book of Bukowski poems in her/his handbag/briefcase; searching online for writer’s residency programs, or other such getaways (that may free her, even temporarily, from the stresses of family life); sipping a mildly alcoholic shandy; looking at a the driveway of her home that she/he has been peering at for over a decade; and, which is now gradually blurring, and metamorphosing into an abyssimal blankness; simply because the gaze has lasted an eternity, uptill this point, and beyond…
— ?
Why indeed should we wish that such a modest mortal be put to the trials and tribulations, that writers wrestle day in and day out?
Stories, opening lines, characters, a plot, a buildup, a twist in the tale, a punch line, and a moral. Oh, my word Haven’t we had enough of these in the world already.
Haven’t we not discovered, that many of us often write similar stories, that end up sounding pretty much the same as many other already written tales.
The monomyth is ancient, and will not go away that easily. And writing a book is no hero’s journey, because it entails intense battles with one’s own demons.
Why fight inner demons, when you can instead sip a pina colada and binge watch The Big Lebowski on repeat mode, for fucks sake? Eudaimonia is achieved with time that is spent well. Well, do you seriously think that time spent writing is time spent well? If you do, I beg you to think again.
I wish to tell those, who tell me to write a book – that this agression will not stand man, even if they have a very nice marmot.
I wish to tell them. But I only wish; that putting words to action has never been my forte to be really honest. Putting action into words is even more cumbersome (shaking my head).
Things, as a writer, may be even worse, when if perchance one were a painter, or a musician.
Canvas and paper, although they perform similar actions, are infact radically different sorts of maladies, that have often adversely affected the human condition. A brand new, primed, and prepared canvas often smells quite bad, which is an undeniable fact. Paper is no less. It is an environmental detriment like no other.
Music itself, is often considered a writer’s friend. Soft pleasing music often plays in the background when writers do what they do. Some of my friends who are actual writers have often claimed that music helps them think, it helps them set an atmosphere for their literary practice, which in turn, helps the creative juices flow. But musicianship, is not necessarily a writer’s best friend. I can bear witness to the fact that being a musician greatly interferes with the prospects of being a writer. Sometimes, when I feel the urge to play the guitar, I often come face to face with the thought that people think I should write instead; and that is something that discourages guitar playing. Inversely, sometimes I ready myself to write, and all of a sudden, the guitar pleads from the corner of the room, to be played and enjoyed.
This is a catch twenty two situation on steroids. I envy the muscians, who have written, and in the same breath, writers who have the ability to play music.
Entanglements, entanglements, entanglements.
We are cursed with unreasonable entanglements, even before we put pen to paper.
Research, documentation, references, appendices, citations, and what have you! Render them unto robots, I say, after all, we are proud of our experiments with artificial intelligence, notwithstanding the fact that putting the words “artificial” and “intelligence” must indeed have required a degree of enhanced idiocy from the person who coined the term in the first instance.
Oh! Let us not get stuck with semiotics. Words amd meanings often do not tally in real life, we all know that very well.
Why not then, we make robots do the dirty work, all that research, documentation, and archiving ofevery last word humans wrote, whether in books, catalogues manuals or whatever! Let the machine do the due diligence.
If this is where the world is headed, why would you ever need to write a book? As a writer you will have to do all this dirty work yourself, you see…? And what if you hit the writer’s block? That is a special kind of hell that has yet to be experienced by many writing enthusiasts.
When I was younger, long ago, once upon an ancient time, I had indeed made the mistake, just once, to attempt the writing of a story.A fictional tale of the exploits of an unemployed man just to stay afloat in society — that was the topic at hand, if I remember correctly. I had managed to have a smooth sailing spree of seventy one pages. Then, a tectonic shift in my circumstances, led me to abandon literary ambition, in favour of getting an income. The writer hit a roadblock. Severe bouts of inaction ensued, days of staring at the blank wall in my bedroom, went by in a jiffy. Time accelerated its pace, like never before, even though a dark and heavy cloud of incompetence (and lethargy) plagued every moment. Now all that remains of that adventure is a seventy one page microsoft word document that lies unopened to this day. To this day, ’tis but a block (of aged cheese) that remains unopened and uneaten!
I submit to your kind judgement, that my cheeze has been moved on occasion. By who? —I do not know.
Ceci n’est pas texte. ‘Tis but just a dribbling pen, that may dribble past hours wasted analysing Andrei Tarkovski’s super slow zoom in(s) of the forbidden zone; or past caverns of mysterious cryptids; or past matters of reportage that bring your attention to the situation in Gaza (including that of eyeless people); or, past the wayside proceedings of my coddiwompling travels.
Nay, nay, nay, they say, persistent practice is a thing of mystery.
This man is sane, and of sound mind! Punish him with your demands, and say to him in clear words, “have you ever thought of writing a book”?
——– end of day one, lament one.
Hopefully, to be continued…
