12/31/2017

A freshness.  I am thinking about Shadow in Gaiman's "Monarch of the Glen."  To chase each apparent thing.  I was also thinking about the irony of my daughter's English class, and about the emphasis placed upon literary analysis.  English class seems, all in all, to be a game of hide and seek.  In fact, a lot of such classes, including Religion.  There is an element of human behavior or consciousness or activity that is "implicit," that is, it is supposed to be "self-evident," or blind to its own machinations.  The blindness is necessary.  The blindness demonstrates that, in some sense, it is truer, or closer to the "source" (define source how you will, as inspiration, as God, as id, etc.).  And then there are whole fields devoted to unpacking the "first act" of art/religion.  It attempts to analyze the symbols, determine stylistic elements, etc.  And this is the entire game of much of academia, at least in the first two discipline fields (arts and humanities)...

So, the game implicit in writing is this...  You are trying to say something while pretending that you are saying nothing at all.  You are trying to move to a known destination, while pretending that you are completely blind, or at the very least, that the landscape  you are traversing is being revealed to you moment by moment, as the reader discovers it.  And the target that the writer tries to achieve is an effect of "not having been tried before," that is, something innovative and new.  But the problem with this is that, over the accrued history, everything has been tried before.  And the things that have not been tried before probably have not been tried because they are not functional, viable as a narrative experiment.  For the very narrative structure imposes forms and rules upon its subject.  Not everything can be told in a story, unfortunately...  It is a game of the right hand not knowing not what the left hand is doing, and vice versa, but then somehow working together and accomplishing something...

The problem of writing has thus been framed, or more specifically, the problem of the "blockage" has been thus framed as one involving a too active editor (the analytical portion of our minds) that squelches the life out of the "first" or implicit...