The Digital Writer |
The challenge is to resist the vanity of the established world and fight though the stickiness of it, to find, at least, some network to build. That is the challenge.
The digital writer has supreme confidence that he will find an audience or that, at least, the audience that is online or will be soon, and his first duty is to build his work out, toward that audience.
The print publishing system tells me in no uncertain terms that it wants Monica books much more than it wants my work. It says this with power and money behind it. I can rationalize it away but it's meaning is still quite clear. So, to be part of a new publishing system is a delightful struggle. What is there to lose but the heavy form of demoralization as both literary values and language get banished from the old publishing system?
I think of two comparable historic moments. One was the beginning of American colonization. My old progenitor, Hosea, didn't stay in England because England had been so good to him. He took the perilous voyage and sold himself for 7 years to get his little hard-scrabble farm. It meant a new life, a new opportunity while old England belonged to the half-mad nobles and their horny women. The other example is the rise of science that was the result, not of the market, but of independent research conducted by men, usually, who had inherited wealth or had rich patrons. Science didn't start off as a mainstream activity. It started off as the act of eccentrics.
And the old country is not the enemy nor is the old belief that the publisher is the center of the writing world rather than the writer. They will close ranks without question. It's not against them. It's for the opportunity opened at this moment by the grace of God.
But, we are not proud. We will fail. We will have some little successes. The judiciousness with which we choose our words is the telling point. The connection we maintain with the writing art, rather than the market system, is the telling point.
The most difficult thing is for the writer to break the kinds of habits that fasten him to the old publishing system. In the few years I've been following electronic publishing, I have emphasized the role of habits. Habits fix us to a perpetual round that we predict, at the outset, will lead to our success. But, sometimes, they fix us to our failures as well. Hope to God you experience the blinding flash that separates you from this round of woe.
Anything less produces an oppression not even dreamt of in times of old. And that is something both the institutions and the people are responsible for.
The first act of the digital writer is to divest himself of every assumption. He takes nothing for granted. What is here today could disappear tomorrow. He must make an accounting of what he loves, what he believes, what he values. The ruling principle will not allow that whether it is religious, political, or economic. Shadows of the truth flit across the screen from time to time but never the truth itself.
Well, one says, we don't want to carry The Truth or your truth or any truth. We live and die and will do it our way, damn to your truth. He is right. Truth, sometimes, is the simplest pleasure smoked at night between the traffic and barking of dogs.
The poets and mystics didn't develop the economic myths. So, who did? The economists and advertisers would be the first to investigate. And what is behind the economist and advertisers but the same motive that erected the religious and state mythologies? So, writers, poets, and mystics are called upon to break through the omnipresent myth and strike to the very heart of meaning, without which life will perish.
Ah, silly fool, they say. All the systems are created by the will to happiness. If a person is happier with more goods, then give them the freedom to pursue more goods. This is fine and good. What we look at are the consequences and the obsessions that tend to destroy human energy rather than contribute to it.
The struggle for the writer is not over who has the most goods or the valuations of the marketplace. It's over the meaninglessness of his pursuit of meaning. That is the core of it.
Money will build and sustain an infrastructure but never the cultural act itself. That act exists in the writer him or herself. At that point, the loyalty of the writer is a telling thing.
We look for, like the philosopher looking for the honest man, something that approximates what we think can be achieved. Almost all written material thus far is a derivative of the print world. A few of the hypertext experiments have been interesting but are relatable to old avant-garde ideas of what writing or art should or shouldn't be.
We want something happening in a public space that hasn't happened before. Wisdom, for instance or original humor.
News chief decries Net content.
In a world like this the digital writer is only interested in one thing: What shows me how to build meaningful things? If a bridge does it, fine. If a computer shows the way, great. If a novel does, then fantastic. Everything else is drek.
Even more than his print counterpart, the digital writer needs what Hemingway called the, "built-in bullshit detector." What he meant was that unless it is built with integrity it is bullshit. And the loss of integrity leads to the types of scandals popular now and, later, war. The digital writer can hardly do anything about it but assign a few unpardonable sins to some of the obvious actors but focus on the few things with integrity that fully helps him build his work.
The potter at her wheel is worth more than all the lying types who keep trying to convince people that the crap is good for them. The literary, political, and economic systems are dependent on the lying.
The digital writer understands he lives in a discredited era; one that will vanish in time with hardly a trace. He feared such a time when he was young. He is strangely nauseated that it has worked out so uncannily before him in the scandals of the past fifteen years or so. It will fall and disappear and only those historians no one reads will know of us. And the digital writer has read those historians and his accuracy is unerring.
Of course, a Hemingway could expatriate himself to Europe to escape the deadening buzz of American culture and find models and forms with integrity. That was possible pre- World War I. In the polar shift of power, however, America is the only reasonable place where great things can be built. And if not America, a great land, then the landscapes of the Internet.
David