Because I've been involved in clarifying, weighing and communicating my ideas by other means -- YouTube and email correspondence predominantly -- I have been neglecting my writing.
I want to return to writing in a more driven way. The detour I've been taking has been to understand my potential audience and the limitations that are involved in having any sort of an audience. Language, it seems to me, is culturally engendered and inculcated, and this is to a higher degree than I'd imagined when I was writing my PhD. At the time I had presumed a greater universality in relation to meanings and ideas.
To understand that language is limited means one must start to write with this in mind. One has to know oneself and where one is positioned in relation to certain chains of meaning. I have a clearer idea of this now, thanks to a certain Internet interlocutor who nonetheless departed in a huff due to our differences over Christianity.
I'm not against Christianity for others, if they wish to partake of it, but being chastized and advised by others is not for me. Using others' reports about me, as conveyed by me, as if it were objective truth about me, also shows a remarkable lack of psychological sophistication. What others report, what others say, can be a form of madness. There are no divine perceptions, just the human thread of meaning, which by being pulled produces distortions in the original fabric. To pull on the thread is to unravel my meaning and my sense of what is valuable. It does no service to objective truth.
And to be plain, it is not even an effective form of oneupmanship. It reveals itself, rather. To tear apart meaning by pulling on the negative aspects of it reveals that one has a passive orientation to life and an indifferent attitude to friendship. It's passive -- because one accepts that meaning is superimposed -- and indifferent because one places equal worth or more on what strangers may say, without bothering to court the one with whom one wishes to be friends.
This is the kind of audience I do not wish to write for, not because there's something wrong with them exactly, but because they're unlike me in values and perception. My goal in life is not to morally perfect myself, but writing in a way that doesn't appeal to Judeo-Christian mores tends to invite the sort of criticism I have found to be pointless. It can be pointed out, for instance, that I don't have feminine virtues along the lines desired by believers. Or it can be said that I don't take advice from those who only want to pull my threads of meaning. More generally, it might be noted that there are improvements to be made.
All of these observations have their basis in fact. But fact is fact. It isn't friendship or something elevated like that. It's not depth of insight. It's not anything really. We all have facts as the baseline of our existence. Those relate to our basic concrete nature, our inescapable contingency. Just as I can point out that aspects of the audience's life do not transcend basic, concrete facts, they can point this out about me. Where we differ is that I don't see that having facts about me is indicative of sinfulness. Yes, we are flesh, not spirit, but that's not a sign of degradation -- It's just normal.
I see myself as an advocate for a form of normality that has fallen into disrepute. It's a false reckoning to say that I am trying to be special, when I'm not attempting such a feat. I'm aiming to be ordinary. But then I do have very special reasons for this -- in that I don't think many people know what ordinary is. They revile the ordinariness within themselves. But because they aspire to be more than what they are and fail, they imagine I must be feeling the same way. I don't -- my failures more than anything else have returned me to myself. I am inordinately happy with the way things have turned out. I like to be myself, which has a good sensation to it.
Don't get me wrong: this is hardly a passive mode. It's just that I've conquered my worst fears and can settle in and enjoy life. The kind of life I've worked hard to achieve is not within the boundaries of community, but on the sidelines. That feels comfortable to me. I want to write for people who enjoy a more detached perspective.
That is all.
XXX
I want to return to writing in a more driven way. The detour I've been taking has been to understand my potential audience and the limitations that are involved in having any sort of an audience. Language, it seems to me, is culturally engendered and inculcated, and this is to a higher degree than I'd imagined when I was writing my PhD. At the time I had presumed a greater universality in relation to meanings and ideas.
To understand that language is limited means one must start to write with this in mind. One has to know oneself and where one is positioned in relation to certain chains of meaning. I have a clearer idea of this now, thanks to a certain Internet interlocutor who nonetheless departed in a huff due to our differences over Christianity.
I'm not against Christianity for others, if they wish to partake of it, but being chastized and advised by others is not for me. Using others' reports about me, as conveyed by me, as if it were objective truth about me, also shows a remarkable lack of psychological sophistication. What others report, what others say, can be a form of madness. There are no divine perceptions, just the human thread of meaning, which by being pulled produces distortions in the original fabric. To pull on the thread is to unravel my meaning and my sense of what is valuable. It does no service to objective truth.
And to be plain, it is not even an effective form of oneupmanship. It reveals itself, rather. To tear apart meaning by pulling on the negative aspects of it reveals that one has a passive orientation to life and an indifferent attitude to friendship. It's passive -- because one accepts that meaning is superimposed -- and indifferent because one places equal worth or more on what strangers may say, without bothering to court the one with whom one wishes to be friends.
This is the kind of audience I do not wish to write for, not because there's something wrong with them exactly, but because they're unlike me in values and perception. My goal in life is not to morally perfect myself, but writing in a way that doesn't appeal to Judeo-Christian mores tends to invite the sort of criticism I have found to be pointless. It can be pointed out, for instance, that I don't have feminine virtues along the lines desired by believers. Or it can be said that I don't take advice from those who only want to pull my threads of meaning. More generally, it might be noted that there are improvements to be made.
All of these observations have their basis in fact. But fact is fact. It isn't friendship or something elevated like that. It's not depth of insight. It's not anything really. We all have facts as the baseline of our existence. Those relate to our basic concrete nature, our inescapable contingency. Just as I can point out that aspects of the audience's life do not transcend basic, concrete facts, they can point this out about me. Where we differ is that I don't see that having facts about me is indicative of sinfulness. Yes, we are flesh, not spirit, but that's not a sign of degradation -- It's just normal.
I see myself as an advocate for a form of normality that has fallen into disrepute. It's a false reckoning to say that I am trying to be special, when I'm not attempting such a feat. I'm aiming to be ordinary. But then I do have very special reasons for this -- in that I don't think many people know what ordinary is. They revile the ordinariness within themselves. But because they aspire to be more than what they are and fail, they imagine I must be feeling the same way. I don't -- my failures more than anything else have returned me to myself. I am inordinately happy with the way things have turned out. I like to be myself, which has a good sensation to it.
Don't get me wrong: this is hardly a passive mode. It's just that I've conquered my worst fears and can settle in and enjoy life. The kind of life I've worked hard to achieve is not within the boundaries of community, but on the sidelines. That feels comfortable to me. I want to write for people who enjoy a more detached perspective.
That is all.
XXX
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