The Digital Writer |
The Digital Writer was telling his good and curious friend why he hadn't pursued money and fame in the writing game. "Well, you go along your path as best you can." He thought a moment and added. "The first step along that path is a very telling one. For instance, if you were writing for fame and fortune then your first step would be the discovery of how famed and wealthy writers got that way." He paused. "Now, in my case, the first step along the path was spending one full month by myself in the mountains....away from everything but the stark blessedness of trees. The second step along that path was moving to a university town where there were lots of books and curious type people. The third step was to reduce life to a very Spartanesque rigor where nothing would interfere with the acquisition of knowledge and experience, most especially that prized trophy in American culture, the life-style. So, you see, the first steps along the path are very telling ones. And once you are on that path there are incontrovertible evidences that, indeed, you stepped a particular way."
The great law of writing has to do with constructive principles that may or may have the approval of the public or a significant portion thereof. Writing is becoming more and more two connected functions: One is a staying hand to the mass culture that is a barbaric, degraded one with frightening power and will, left to its own devices, end a liberal, democratic culture. The writer insists on the interior, on the spaces of the inner life; of meaning, memory, connection, individuality, imagination, quirkiness, and other subplots of the individual citizen. Mass culture tries to destroy all of these things on behalf of a myth that favors a very, very few and destroys many. Every person has to learn this lesson in their own way.
And, of course, the Net is becoming or threatening to become a mass medium controlled by very few corporations who control the popular mythology. It's much more likely that the money gained through porn, gambling, day-trading, and other forms of addiction will gain the upperhand on the Net. The government, too, will play a greater role in the years to come. If that's the whole show then it will be a sad one. The Net depends on quality on each side of the interface. When that quality meets on common ground, then good things can happen. And writing, the best of it, is always written by one person for another person.
The second function of writing is to provide a positive, constructive principle embedded in the nature of the work. Sometimes this is eccentric, sometimes profound but it's always there when and only when the writer cares. The writer must care, must sacrifice, must study, must do everything to bring off the deed. And it is that effort that is singular.
To be fair to the print publishing world, it's not their responsibility to differentiate the good and the bad in all the products they put out. If the people want to sit on the toilet reading Tom Clancy that's their privilege. Or, if commuters on the train want to read thick romance novels so be it. But then, the digital writer has the right to assert himself and say, well, I don't want to involve myself in an industry that caters to mass taste. I want to sculpt out some virtual space of my own that is made in accordance with my principles, whatever they may be. And given the freedom, I would certainly express those values.
For this, the Net is far superior as long as the writer has other skills than writing.
The American writer feeds on space. It crosses water but always empties in the widest sky imaginable. It is not built from cities but from roaming around. The city, for the American writer, is often just a waystation; a place to pick up good tales and characters but nothing he is committed to. Better to live in the city not yet built, he says. Better to live in the cities they will build on Mars.
The city is an old place. It's still exciting but it recycles the old hatreds, the old animosities, the old degradations, the old addictions, the old scams and corruption's. And innocence, too, is cycled through.
The future is the unfinished business and the writer assumes that 98% of the present world will vanish and is filled with empty gesture, noise, obscenity, cruelty, hatred, and bad jokes. It will disappear. It is utterly crucial, then, for the writer to find the small percentage that has vitality and will grow and flourish into the next tomorrow.
That is the poet. Even the poet who writes prose.
We will inhabit the future. We will be the man who on the advent of the printing press began to think about airplanes. And you foolish humans, fighting and cursing like demonic playthings of some fairy tale ogre, your woe will be recorded once and then forgotten for all time.
Not simply audacious structure but grand tales and songs told at the very tip of consciousness, at its horizon point where it meets eternity. In that sense we are alive and connected to everything that has been constructed well in the past. We are grateful for the connection! It yanks us free of some obsessed degradation that is furious in its denial of anything but itself.
Any good piece of writing is a brace against the choatic world that would destroy any need for structure. Good writing will save us from evil, at times. Writing that is thought out, conscious of itself yet innocent and brave despite all the evidence against it.
David
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