By Reid Kurashige, Williams ‘22
1
Any exposition on writing must begin with a singular confession: it is by no means a natural thing for humans to write. While the newborn enters the world with a wail, the germ of spoken language, she is equipped with no such tool for writing: the letter is ever more distant than the phoneme from our nature. Though the utility of speech can clearly be linked with the pressing demands of survival, the emergence of writing is conceivable only in species which have already survived — which have made the jump, that is, from day-to-day self-preservation to the luxury of linguistic preservation. It is in light of this jump that writing resists biologism, embodying, as it were, a gap between the immediate needs of nature and the contingent spirit of culture. As such, I suggest we take Marx with a grain of salt when he states that “Milton produced Paradise Lost in the way that a silkworm produces silk,” for although what we write may express our essential nature, that we write cannot. This distinction centers itself, as I see it, at the crux of the question of writing.
The written tradition does not evolve in a straightforward line; it rather twists and turns with no set direction, subject to the whims of a discontinuous history. There is no progress from lyric to novel, or Enlightenment prose to Romantic poetry, only spurts of innovation that reveal new ways for writing to flourish. The bounds of the canon are continually pushed by individual exemplars, changing media, and the crossing of cultural horizons, such that the writings of today challenge our perspectives on those of yesterday: the video essay, the advertisement, the rap song, and even, of course, the blog post all reimagine what writing can (and should) mean. If there’s at all a spine through the myriad forms of writing, I’d like to propose a loose sense of language with the lag of intention. This is ultimately the source of what’s so unnatural about writing: what doesn’t come naturally to us, as silk-spinning to a silkworm, must instead be drawn from the crucible of intention, whether consciously or not. This is why writing strikes me as a uniquely vulnerable process, expressing the decisions we brood upon and eventually make, capturing through this a picture of our inner selves. Indeed, our pieces of writing can feel as if they were pieces of ourselves — precisely to the extent that the act of writing itself is not.
Nevertheless, I must admit: the unnaturality of writing is commonly betrayed by our experience of writing. At times — more often than not for some — we write with the same ease of a breath, and it would seem unfitting, nigh insulting, to uphold that writing is beyond our nature. In these moments, when words leap forth onto paper, darting as if they must arrive, one simply cannot help but write, the lag of intention swept into a stream with no break in sight, the hand moving this way and that, before and even against the will. But when writing writes itself, it also serves to obfuscate the task of the writer, who is forgotten under that veil of naturality — a testament to our knack for internalizing and reproducing social artifice. When we are certain this is the perfect term or that sounds wrong, we do not apply some rigorous procedure or remember an objective principle of writing. Instead, our certainty stems merely from the rings of our tree of knowledge: with greater experience, practice, and indoctrination in a written tradition, we more fluently invoke the indeterminate rules and guidelines underlying that precarious thing we call ‘good writing.’ But such an invocation is, because natural, incognizant of itself, akin to the “Aha!” moment of a Rorschach test. In order to write about writing, then, one must first aim to denaturalize it; the windowpane is, as it were, most visible at its edges — or better yet, where it has cracked. And so I begin at the shards of writing, where we confront its jagged face at its utmost unnatural, those winces of pain when we battle our own words, when it’d be simpler to fit a camel through the eye of a needle than a sentence through the fog of our thoughts — and language threatens to drown in a shudder of helplessness. My starting point, in short, is the experience of writer’s block.
2
Thought does not progress in a single direction; instead, the moments are interwoven as in a carpet. The fruitfulness of the thoughts depends on the density of texture.
– Theodor Adorno, “The Essay as Form”
Let your mind wander for a short while, and you’ll see that our thoughts and knowledge are hardly linear. I do not doubt, of course, that lines of interest can intersect for us, relations of dependence emerge, and main topics, theses, and arguments unfold — but we can never string up our ideas like beads, with each leading to the next. Not even in basic logical deductions could this be so: no matter the truth of its conclusion, a chain of propositions must rely upon certain rules of inference in demonstrating its validity — rules which necessarily lay outside the linear structure of the proof. So rather than picturing our concepts as forming parallel lines, we should imagine them as constructing a kind of flexible graph, or in Nietzsche’s words, as weaving a web “delicate enough to be carried along by the waves, strong enough not to be blown apart by every wind.”
The basic intent of most writing is to represent one’s epistemic graph; this is paradigmatically the goal of the essay, the form I will henceforth discuss. Regardless of how the essay is written, it’s intended to be read from the first paragraph to the last — and as such, its graph must be rendered linear as well, from some first idea to a last. A well-chosen order allows the writer to meet the reader where he stands; since no one shares our exact web of knowledge, the aim is to reweave it from just a few common strands, iteratively building up the various associations, branches, and arguments we’d like to impart. But in light of the essay’s structure, it’s clear that we could never capture the full scope of an epistemic graph, which contains a range of nonlinear dimensions. The writer must seek, then, to merely echo her thoughts in her words, rather than perfectly reproducing them. Put another way, her goal is to translate what is nonlinear into that which is linear, preserving the complexity of the former within the orderliness of the latter.
The writer is therefore tasked with resolving a dialectic of sorts: on the one end, we see the creases and layers of thought, while on the other, the analytic mold of an essay. The struggle of squaring these ends, which draws in no small part from its open-endedness, often effects our literary impotence: to the extent that knowledge is a web, writer’s block is a pesky knot, which tightens the more we attempt to release it. When we get caught in this, it’s because we worry our thoughts will somehow spoil in writing: perhaps our essay will distort them, diminishing their span or depth, even ruining them. Such worries are well-founded. For all writing must at one point cut its epistemic graph to loosen this knot, and it is the fear of making the wrong cut — or making the cut at all — that hinders us from putting pen to paper. To overcome this anxiety, we ought to recognize the impossibility of preserving our entire web of knowledge: some bits simply must fall off for others to come together, and the essay can only be so long. In this way, the task of the writer is analogous to that of the sculptor, who carves away material to reveal the form of his work. For both, creativity is inscribed within a process of destruction, which confronts the unready artist as distasteful, as something to prevent or to resist, suspending her in writer’s block. Precisely at this moment, she must acknowledge writing as unnatural, unnerving even, so that she can then brace herself — and lean into the pain of the cut.
3
Bridging the gap between thoughts and words — performing what I call the cut of writing — is experienced as a leap of faith, before which, at the edge of our hopes and intentions, it is only natural to hesitate for a moment. The higher the stakes, the more likely we are to suffer from acrophobia looking down. Implicitly, this fear is attached to the idea that bridging the gap between thoughts and words is actually possible — that the writer’s leap of faith can reach the other side. But if we assume this perspective, then every instance of writing will appear to us as failure, for the structures of thoughts and essays are fundamentally incommensurable. Attempting to perfectly interlace the two is a fool’s game; again, the writer must aim only for the aftershocks of perfection, not perfection itself. The necessary shortcoming of these aftershocks is at once the pain and the pleasure of writing: though we all must fail, it’s our creative freedom to choose the role, import, and meaning of this failure. The task of the writer who leaps, then, is to fall with grace — and only in light of the fall can we imagine the grace of writing. Or as Derrida would say, the possibility that meaning may not arrive conditions its very possibility of arrival. This is the bet taken by each and every writer; this is the fountainhead of style.
Allow me to burden the reader with yet another metaphor: a statue sits still in the midst of a town, unmoved since the day it was placed there. Passersby appreciate the intricacies of the statue, drifting here and there to behold it from every angle, gasping at the brilliance, the layers, the meticulous details of the artwork, a singular achievement to be honored as such. In contrast, the writer looks not to the statue but at its shadow, waiting for that one millisecond when the clouds part and the sun shines just right upon the statue — the moment when the shadow transfigures into an image, a work of art in its own right. By turning her eyes to the ground, it is true that the writer sacrifices some of the complexity of the upright statue; but the loss of this dimension opens up possibilities in another: where there is only one statue, there is an infinite number of shadows. Some are so long they blur, others so short they can hardly be seen; this one displays the statue’s back, that one its distinctive front. All fail, of course, to show the statue in its spectacular whole. But in spite of this, the writer believes — indeed, she must believe — that the statue, fixed in place for so long, reawakens in that dance of shadows, and it is precisely this new life that she sets out to capture, patiently.
4
As most professors would love to tell you, writing is a form of thinking. In the midst of an essay, it’s healthy for our ideas to toss and turn, sometimes taking paths that shock even us, as this allows us to strengthen and expound upon the epistemic graph with which we began. Rare is the writer who simply translates his thoughts into words, or outline into essay — rare, and likely amateurish. For the writing process is a powerful opportunity to freely play with our ideas, a creative platform through which we can delve into the nooks and crannies of our imagination. Furthermore, as we write we are forced to anchor our amorphous thoughts in determinate phrases, at least for a little while. In these moments, we’re able to put to test certain strands of knowledge, isolating them from the larger, ever -expanding and -shifting web, thereby measuring their individual limits: by concretizing our ideas, we see more clearly their fallacies, ambiguities, and (ir)relevance, which can serve as inspiration for much-needed revisions. In these ways and more, writing is undoubtedly a medium for serious, expository, even enjoyable reflection and discovery.
But writing is not only thinking; writing is also thinking about thinking. Throughout the writing process, we are compelled to ask ourselves where this idea fits, or on what presuppositions that conclusion relies, or which particular subset of claims is needed, and so on. It is precisely these questions that propel us into writer’s block, calling upon us to reimagine our epistemic graph in a linear model, to rearrange its nodes and relations in the manner most convincing and accurate. Writing is thus organizational — but not in the rigid sense of a filing cabinet. Instead, the writer organizes with the baton of a conductor. This is why I’m bothered by the supposed virtue of a writerly ‘voice’: for me, the writer is not one who sings but who harmonizes, drawing out a tune here, adjusting the pitch of a note there, synthesizing a medley of instruments into a singular concerto. A good writer must renounce her voice, letting her ideas sing for themselves, not rampantly but in unison. The quality of a piece of writing, then, can never be divorced from its quality of thought: the essayist may fail to meet the heights of a great idea, but he can never surpass the bounds of a poor one. (Ironically, this is perhaps the closest truth to Descartes’ principle of sufficient reason.) All writing pursues this asymptote, and the best writing hints at what is beyond.
5
You simply sit down at a typewriter, open your veins, and bleed.
– Red Smith, Naugatuck Daily News (April 6, 1949)
It’s a common misconception that you must like what you love: although I certainly love writing, I cannot claim to have ever liked it. By and large, it is excruciating for me to write, for the pressure of my ideas looms over every word I choose as a critic, whispering to me that something must change — that something, somewhere, is wrong — without specifying any further. To give life to my writing, I find that I must sap some of my own; yet rarely do I bleed so readily as an open vein. More often, I feel as if I were a towel on the brink of dryness, painstakingly choked, wrung, and pressed for another drop. It is my unfortunate luck that this experience — this focused self-asphyxiation, whose success is but a deep breath and a sigh — is what produces my best work: my thoughts and communication tend to refine with the lag of intention, however painful this may be. I write in the way of Kierkegaard’s poet: the fate we share is “that of the unfortunate victims whom the tyrant Phalaris imprisoned in a brazen bull, and slowly tortured over a steady fire; their cries could not reach the tyrant’s ears so as to strike terror into his heart; when they reached his ears they sounded like sweet music.” With eerie proportionality the degree of my struggle informs the strength of my writing.
Whenever I approach an essay, I imagine my task as weaving three strands, which fold and refold upon each other, albeit in a rough order: brainstorming, writing, and editing. For the first, I’ve tried everything from concept mapping, to freewriting, to taking long baths, and so on — all seem to work, and my method of choice is generally dependent on the amount of time I have: in the ideal case, I’m able to explore my ideas from as many angles and techniques as possible, enriching my epistemic graph. Either way, I make sure to end with an outline, in which I collect and organize my thoughts, after which I begin writing. Throughout my first draft, I refer to my prewriting material as a flexible guideline — not at all as scripture — such that I’m always ready to fill in a gap, change course, or completely restart. I focus on two elements as I write: balance and flow. These terms are difficult to describe since I only ever feel them, trusting the experience, tradition, and reading sedimented in my bones — trusting, indeed, but not blindly, as every essay merits its own unique style, developed by my wrestling with the painful process aforementioned. I see balance and flow as inexplicable yet intentional: with them in mind, I strive to group ideas that already, in one way or another, loosely ‘belong together.’ This is my personal answer to the writer’s dialectic, since the concepts of balance and flow can neither be understood as linear nor nonlinear: if the former, I’d be able to explain why the ideas they synthesize belong together; if the latter, they wouldn’t pertain to essays. They therefore occupy, in my eyes, a space in between, representing traces of the nonlinear in the linear — of the graph in the writing. Finally, I edit with fervor, emulating the reader’s perspective as I play with the essay’s architecture. A strategy I commonly use here is reverse outlining: by reading only the first sentence of each paragraph, one can gauge whether or not they are cleanly ordered.
Hardly ever are these strands separate enough to be pulled apart: for writing is thinking, and writing is rewriting.
6
For ancient Polynesian sailors, marine navigation was a performance of the body. Taught by a tradition of wayfarers, they learned to sift from the motion and texture of waves the topos of the nearby area. This is how one imagines the task of the writer: we must lie down upon our ships, feel the tides reverberate in our bones, and determine through this the direction toward land. Everything, it seems, is at stake.
In our writerly journey, Plexus evokes what the wave pilots once called rebbelib.
Postscript
The Tower of Babel describes, as it were, only the diversity of speech, seeing in it a divine punishment wreaked upon our hubris, which convinced us the heavens were within our reach. This cannot explain the diversity of the written tradition, for writing is branded with the mark of Cain, which paradoxically served as both punishment and liberation. As such, we are asked to imagine a new parable, one hinted at first by Kafka, but only in passing. We must conceive of writing as the bottomless Pit of Babel: dust-ridden, arduous, and ever-unfinished, but deep enough to echo the anxious strike of iron.
Reid studies Philosophy as well as Comparative Literature at Williams.
