Writing Is How I Feel About Paper

 Language is born of absence. It creates a substitute for something not present. It’s a game of substitution. I’m writing these words on a desk. The desk is present to me, but not to you, who may be sitting at a desk of your own, or sitting on a bus, or a bench in a city park. But by writing the word ‘desk’ I can create an image of a desk in your mind. It won’t be my desk, but it will be a desk, the desk that you have imagined which will be a different desk with different drawers, different knobs, different legs, a different surface, a different color, a different history, a different weight, a different size and shape. I can bring it within a more palpable range by describing it in detail. And I can achieve this effect in writing with greater facility than in speech because writing affords me the time to think and select all the best characterizations. And this is where we might be able to defeat the negations of absence and make something feel present that isn’t actually present. Its presence will be illusory. But in another sense its presence will also be essential. It will be removed from the empirical realm and raised into a more transcendent realm. The realm of writing, which is a realm of enchantment.

 “Writing heightens consciousness,” wrote Walter J. Ong in Orality and Literacy. “Alienation from a natural milieu can be good for us…

…and indeed is in many ways essential for full human life. To live and to understand fully, we need not only proximity but also distance. This writing provides for consciousness as nothing else does…Writing is often regarded at first as an instrument of secret and magic power. Traces of this early attitude toward writing can still show etymologically: the Middle English ‘grammarye’ or grammar, referring to book-learning, came to mean occult or magical lore, and through one Scottish dialectical form has emerged in our present English vocabulary as ‘glamor’ (spell-casting power). ‘Glamor girls’ are grammar girls…By separating the knower from the known, writing makes possible increasingly articulate introspectivity, opening the psyche as never before not only to the external objective world quite distinct form itself but also to the interior self against whom the objective world is set. Writing makes possible the great introspective religious traditions such as Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam…

The highly interiorized stages of consciousness in which the individual is not so immersed unconsciously in communal structures are stages which, it appears, consciousness would never reach without writing. The interaction between the orality that all human beings are born into and the technology of writing, which no one is born into, touches the depths of the psyche. Ontogenetically and phylogenetically, it is the oral word that first illuminates consciousness with articulate language, that first divides subject and predicate and then relates them to one another, and that ties human beings to one another in society. Writing introduces division and alienation, but a higher unity as well. It intensifies the sense of self and fosters more conscious interaction between persons. Writing is consciousness-raising.

Writing is how I feel about paper. Infinity gets a tan. My neck slips through a fog of thought to my head, which rides on my shoulders, enjoying the ride thought the living room, and eventually outside, where all the people endure the great adventure of being, some with smiles, some with frowns, some with the flaming gauze of sunset in their eyes, some with conversation and some in assembly making points and demonstrations.

I enjoy driving, which is also a form of writing, because it’s phenomenological and metaphorical all at once and I have to look around and see what other people are doing and then make decisions based on the decisions of the other drivers while making deft maneuvers and bringing up things from the past and making hollow cylinders of thought roll around in my brain while I wait for the light to change.

Which is not at all like writing I don’t know why I wrote that. Sometimes it just feels good to put one word after another and see what might happen if I add a little salt and smokestack lightning. I want to bring the roots of my reverie tree to a fat canopy of leafage and savagery by eating the sun. And then grow another way out. Another murmuring gestation. Another deformation. Another meditation. Another blow to the empire.

The claws stroke away at the moon. I swoon daily. Benevolence has a scarlet beauty, a quintessentially Friday mouth. And so I move my gelatin arm making words appear that might one day steal away into elsewhere.

And this causes sexual arousal, which is hawks circling in a sky. An unpredictable laundry. The feeling of thirst when it’s first quenched. A dream explained at a kitchen table.