Life in the 20th century was all about dials. Radio dials, TV dials, speaker dials, watch dials, clock dials, ovens and washing machines, oscilloscopes and telescopes, there was even a soap called Dial. Dials are easy and unequivocal. It feels good to turn a dial. The control is straightforward. Uncomplicated. Life in the 21st century is all about touchscreens. It’s slightly less convenient, a little more tentative. Icons and symbols get accidentally touched and things go haywire. Everything suddenly turns complicated. Maddening. It’s harder to control things. There’s always a function for help, but the help arrives in a language that is indecipherable. One’s day gets lost going down one rabbit hole after another. Again: maddening. One feels a loss of control. A creeping obsolescence undermines one’s sense of ease and confidence. One’s sense of relevance.
One wonders: is this due
to an erosion in communication skills? A deluded idea that anything in computer
technology is inherently superior to analog technology? I think it’s both.
Erosions in communication have been massive. The delusions of high-tech border
on psychosis. Tech giants that believe they’re gods. That hunger for
immortality and transhumanism. That want to rid themselves of their humanity
and become androids gifted with superpowers. No wonder life in the 21st
century feels like living in a comic book. Life is continually under attack by
supervillains.
Poetry is a lost art.
Reading is a lost art. The few, such as myself, that persist in its
impoverished domain dream wistfully of a place like the encampment of book
lovers at the end of François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451, which was based
on the novel by Ray Bradbury, who despised modern poetry. One wonders what he
meant by modern poetry. Ezra Pound? Marianne Moore? T.S. Eliot? Gertrude Stein?
I watch a video hosted by
a female, thirty-something literary agent on the topic of her clients being
worried about AI written novels taking over the market. It’s hard to sit
through the video because the host uses that infantile up-speak for getting her
message across. That is, however, the way people in that age group talk now.
They don’t sound like Gore Vidal or Malcolm Ex. They don’t sound like Susan
Sontag or Doris Lessing or Alice Walker. They sound like they’re kindergartner
teachers addressing a class of five-year-olds. I did, however, like her overall
message. Concentrate on the quality of the writing. I can’t argue with that.
She also encourages writing high quality, prestige writing; difficult and
challenging writing, and cites some figures that convincingly argue that there
is a market for this kind of writing. It’s in the area of marketing where she
disappoints my demand for integrity in writing. Marketing is for marketers, not
for authors. Marketing is a special expertise that has little to do with the
kind of intense concentration and mental juggling an author must do to create a
language that engages the mind and inspires creativity in the reader. Like any
selling, there’s a skill and a demeaning aspect to manipulating emotion and
generating a superficial excitement based on ludicrous notions of popularity
and personality, concepts that are anathema to the creative writer. A lot of
publishers have shifted that onerous task onto the authors, which is utterly
absurd. People who take to writing often do so because they don’t connect
artfully with the public. They’re authentic people intensely uncomfortable with
playing roles, especially performances gauged to influence. I find the current
trend of influencers on social media to be yet another sign of moral decay.
This also betrays how
unrealistic I am. If I’m going to be honest about generating an audience for my
writing, I have to concede that figuring out ways to publicize my work is going
to bear some importance. If you’re going to raise horses, you have to learn to
shovel shit. I just don’t like it.
My wife came home from a
local nursery with a hibiscus today. It has bright red flowers and she's
completely in love with it. I know the feeling. I get that way whenever I
encounter a beautifully crafted paragraph. But that’s too limiting. It isn’t
just the craftsmanship of the phrasing and grammar, the way words flow together
in an undulating field of meaning, like the green hills of England, or the
dazzle of fishing lures mounted above a hamburger grill. That was in the Turtle
Mountains of North Dakota, by Lake Metigoshe, and comprised all the reasons
anyone would ever need for the use of an outboard. These are structural
qualities, things that turn the mind like a driveshaft. It’s when a body of
words scuds across a crowded dance floor without tripping anybody that piques
the upper registers of the mind. The words conjure the hully gully, and the
ruminations it inspires sparkle like a mirror ball at a Cincinnati rave. It’s
never just craftsmanship. Quirks of grammar. Bon mots. It’s when the letters
bristle on a wolf, and thrash at the air, that it nears its goal. But it’s when
the entire scene vanishes and turns to nothing that it sparks into life, and
bites the sun. Writers that can do that amaze me. There are powers in language,
and the writers that find them have eyes like Emily Dickinson.
Word processing is an
unassuming stool. I say this because the satisfaction of the boomerang arrives
with the dyspepsia of the straggler purged by the morning winds of a general
tumefaction. From the point of view of common sense, the anvil doesn’t have feelings.
But from the point of view of iron, the anvil is livid with syntax. This is
because language is held together by moonlight. A sense of interiority alters
beside the cardboard, but the arousal of a violin from a cup of tea amazes both
the potential for mayhem and the sympathy of strings. This is because language
runs on prestidigitation. We often exclaim the very tools that crash the savor
of themselves. And this causes a great alternative to hurl itself at our
necessities. The nouns with these shapes get them from fencing predicates. The
others ride a caboose to the blast sight, and assume the form of clay.
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