wot is this writing fing den?
biological syntax
Written word and spoken word are two distinct modes of expression. WE all respond to the spoken word; in utero we first encounter it, our forming ears awash with biological syntax as our brains develop. Noam Chomsky points out (somewhere – this ain’t an essay) that even babies born deaf still have an innate understanding of language and desire to name and COMMUNICATE, and that grammar itself appears to have a human commonality. Language then may have shaped the evolution of our growing brains, rather than our brains adopting language to EXPRESS their increasingly complex conceptualization. The language function is root, basal, an innate part of what it is to be human.
AN UNBURDENING OF CONSCIOUSNESS
All art forms are AN UNBURDENING OF CONSCIOUSNESS, an interpretation of the interactions between our SELVES and our environments. Music, movement, song, drawing, spoken word in the form of theatre and storytelling, sculpting are all pretty much central to the human experience, having roots in our physical states and the laws of physics governing the order of our WORLDS.
Quite a thing
Writing, though, is a departure from these expressive tools. It is a dramatic extension and expansion of the use of symbols found in drawing into entirely new realms. Before you pull me up on that, yes, I am aware of the evidence of humanity’s penchant for symbolism across the spectrum of the Arts, and into our earliest imaginings; Astronomy, Algebra, horror films, faces on the moon, cave art, tribal hunting dances; we love to do it. It seems that we’re born to do it. However, the leap from pictogram to phonetic alphabet was quite a thing, really. Quite a thing.
the magic of it
Part of me is still so enthralled by the magic of it! I can write a sentence: Today I was bitten by a shark. I can write it on a piece of
paper, or carve it into a stone block, or pay for it to be projected onto the surface of our unfortunate moon. Then I can go away and die (probably of blood loss.) As long as my written artefact remains, literate human beings who look upon this combination of shapes will have a set of concepts transferred into their minds. They will wonder who I was. They will wince at the memory of bites they have experienced. They will remember the first time they watched Jaws. They will wonder when “Today” was. They will, hopefully, wonder if I really was bitten by a shark today (because I wasn’t, I made it up). Each word, a combination of tiny symbols, will open for them the doors of whole rooms full of INTENTIONALITY and potential.
AN OPEN BOOK TO US
Literacy has shaped the human brain and swung the course of our evolution. Stephen Pinker, in his devastating “The Angels of our Better Nature”, makes a fantastic case for the third person novel as the direct progenitor of humanistic political movements. To put it simply, he believes that the human ability to empathise was transformed by the new human experience of being able to read a detailed account of life from the perspective of another person. Suddenly, the horror of slavery, wife-beating and executions were AN OPEN BOOK TO US. Middle-class literate folk could imagine the hardship of life as a chimney sweep or a little match girl. A wave of civil rights, suffrage, labour and peace movements followed.
As long as my written artefact remains
AND THERE’S THE RUB. Now my written artefact is digitized, mutable. Where is my written artefact? Is it archived? Does it have a paywall in front of it? Who can access it? Remember Winston Smith and his Ministry of Truth? Winston had to sit down and physically rewrite and alter newspaper clippings, because Orwell couldn’t conceive of a technology as Ministry-friendly as the internet. I’ve often gone looking for things I should be easily able to find to be confronted with HTTP Error 403.
scrawling FUCK SCHOOL on the toilet door
Since the advent of the printing press, handwritten vs printed has become a major consideration in how we hierarchize our information streams. The subversive power of Graffiti is a thing to fear, while newspapers and other printed publications are legitimized. In the past, they were legitimized because they had money behind them; at the very least, the owner of a printing press had the power and wherewithal to put out some VERSION OF THE TRUTH that people deferred to. Now we all sit at home self-publishing our every thought in Calibri. Yet the ingrained desire to believe print has been dragged into the digital age; chat-room Trolls inspire waves of concern when all they are really doing is indulging in the digital equivalent of scrawling FUCK SCHOOL on the toilet door.
our strangest fiction of all.
VERIFICATION. Verification is the future. In the roiling torrents of words and opinions, I need access to means of verifying my information streams. I’m tired of facebook hoaxes being shared as if they were true, and comment threads full of misleading misinformation. I’m tired of everyone’s agenda and the seagull-clamouring for crumbs of truth. Or maybe I’m tired of the truth, our strangest fiction of all
Horses of Meaning 