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| Completely unrelated photo I love from my recent trip to Gunsan |
Just had a mind-breaking moment while visiting an acquaintance's blog...
Like many bloggers, she has a quote at the top of her page- though, perhaps somewhat uncommonly, her's is by Michel Foucault:
"IF I HAD TO WRITE A BOOK TO COMMUNICATE WHAT I WAS ALREADY THINKING, I WOULD NEVER HAVE THE COURAGE TO BEGIN. I ONLY WRITE A BOOK BECAUSE I DON'T KNOW EXACTLY WHAT TO THINK ABOUT THIS THING THAT I SO MUCH WANT TO THINK ABOUT, SO THAT THE BOOK TRANSFORMS ME AND TRANSFORMS WHAT I THINK."
This blew my brain right open. Perhaps I'd read it before - I've read quite a bit of Foucault - perhaps less than some of my past Theory teachers were under the impression I'd read, but a lot none the less - but if so, the surrounding text swallowed my reaction to this little bit of brain-breakage.
"IF I HAD TO WRITE A BOOK TO COMMUNICATE WHAT I WAS ALREADY THINKING, I WOULD NEVER HAVE THE COURAGE TO BEGIN. I ONLY WRITE A BOOK BECAUSE I DON'T KNOW EXACTLY WHAT TO THINK ABOUT THIS THING THAT I SO MUCH WANT TO THINK ABOUT, SO THAT THE BOOK TRANSFORMS ME AND TRANSFORMS WHAT I THINK."
This is why I've never written a book. This is why I struggle so much just to write a blog post. This is why the best writing I've done has always been the hardest, the writing where I really don't know even know what I want to try and find, just that there are all these interesting or hard things that I've noticed in the text, or in my life. And this is why, as I write - usually slowly and painfully - I come to know what I think, or at least get to what questions I want to think about...
Perhaps this is also why I've frequently felt my best writing was academic rather than creative (though I am not convinced that is a fair distinction, because I think that you need a fair to huge amount of creativity to write well academically). Academic writing, while frequently arguing for something, always seemed to me more about the exploration of these arguments - the figuring out of why they are, how they work, what the intersections and connections are - than a presentation of what the author knows... good academic writing anyway... though I am not saying that I think deliberate obsfucation is good here (or anywhere other than vampire role-playing games)... that is rather the opposite of what good writing does - so-called creative or academic writing...
And it also may be why I've always had such a hard time with the advice to "write what you know" ... I often wonder why this is interesting to anyone, and now realize that question arises because it is not what is interesting to me... I am interested in what I don't know, not what I do... because there is so much out there that I still need to figure out. Learning has always been the point of school for me, not grades or degrees (as my rather checkered and extended academic career might indicate)... so I don't really know what this means for me now, but perhaps I will just let it sit for a while with my broken brain... and then perhaps I will write to figure it out...
"IF I HAD TO WRITE A BOOK TO COMMUNICATE WHAT I WAS ALREADY THINKING, I WOULD NEVER HAVE THE COURAGE TO BEGIN. I ONLY WRITE A BOOK BECAUSE I DON'T KNOW EXACTLY WHAT TO THINK ABOUT THIS THING THAT I SO MUCH WANT TO THINK ABOUT, SO THAT THE BOOK TRANSFORMS ME AND TRANSFORMS WHAT I THINK."
