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Thoughts on How We Write the Word (Excerpted from an e-mail which I composed last Friday...) I've been told on numerous occasions that I write exactly like I talk. This is for the most part true, as I do, in fact, tend to use rather florid language in both situations. My conversation, though, is often extremely prone to meandering off on tangents, then, sometimes, returning to the initial line of discussion. My writing, if I simply type things directly into a computer, tends to follow the same pattern, only without the predictable returns. If, however, I have the foresight to scribble notes to myself to organise these jangling thoughts, I have a greater rate of success at writing comprehensibly. On the extreme end of this pattern, if I actually write what I wish to say out in long-hand before typing it, the intent becomes more clear, and the style more refined. I suppose this to be the result of my experiences growing up, which I suspect may in fact be a cultural phenomenon; growing up, and even all through high school, all of my writing was done by hand -- essays, short-stories, poetry, song lyrics, letters, and anything else. It was not until college that I began simply typing things into the computer in what might have been an attempt to capture more quickly the thoughts, even the vaguest flashes of ideas which charged through the neurons. (Suzanne Vega, in the song "Language," writes, "These words are too solid; they don't move fast enough to catch the blur in the brain that flies by and is gone.") This was ultimately, I suppose, a self-defeating undertaking, as the time requires to analyse, to distill, to ferment, to synthesise the thoughts into coherent sentences was cast aside, resulting in much sloppiness and bad economy of language. The best writing I did, in college and after, typically began with me physically putting pen to paper, and I, in my probably foolish habit of "mystifying the artistic process" (I don't believe you would argue against my position of writing being an art?) believed it was the "organic" connection of the hand to the ben to the paper, evading the sterilising and corrosive influence of the machine. In retrospect, I believe it is a far more pragmatic issue: In writing things out, a rather large amount of physical effort and resources are involved; one does not want (whether consciously or no) to have to copy out one's entire text a second time by hand. With the computer, comes an implicitly greater ease of editing, grabbing text and moving it while scarcely lifting a finger, save to click the mouse buttons, or even obliterating it completely, without a trace of untidy ink scratches. I wonder what the ramifications of these procedural changes will be for present and future generations; I believe we see them clearly already in the thoughtless commonplace unpunctuated e-mails, lacking any sort of capitalisation, linguistic interest, colourful vocabulary, or structural integrity. Is the well-written word becoming obsolete? Or has it already done so, and am I really, like the letters I write on this page, having just finished a gluttonous lunch of Indian food and lingering ofver the last of my lager, returning late to the office, a relic, left sinking in the seas of the past? (Okay, so that was really rather purple, but you get the point.) I'm reminded, by this analysis of the nature of writing, of the time I spent living in Paris after I finished college. My mother's pastor wrote to me while I was there, then wrote again, having expressed his dismay, both in his second letter and to my mother, that I'd not responded. So I responded to his second leter, and my Mother and I both observed that he'd clearly been unaware of what he was asking, as he commented to her later that reading my letters was rather like watching a pond after someone has thrown in a stone of indeterminate size. One sees all manner of ripples emanating from a central source, but doesn't really know quite how far they'll go, or where, or for how long. I tend to think it's a bit more like a river which runs backwards, flowing from the sea up its course, branching off in countless directions, yet always ultimately continuing on its central cource, to its end -- its source its finish. "The last shall be first, and the first shall be last," or something like that. r
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