The Sacred Significance of Writing
Ever since the dawn of time, humans have been telling one another stories. We get captivated, drawn in and carried away by our stories, and we always have — to tell stories is to be human, and to appreciate them is to have proof you are alive.
When we first invented writing, we were suddenly capable of capturing such stories in an enduring form, and from then on the entire way in which we engaged with these stories shifted so dramatically that now we cannot even imagine what it would have been like for the stories to be woven into our everyday lives as they once were. Now, books are discrete objects that you pick up, read, then put back down on a shelf, returning to them — or not — at your leisure. Back then, though… the stories were alive.
They were alive first and foremost because they were constantly being reformulated and rejuvenated by the newest generation to learn them and, eventually, to tell them again to their own children. They were also, however, alive in a secondary and perhaps more profound sense, which is this: they were lived out, and then modified on the basis of that living out to contain the insights which can only be obtained through direct experience. In this way, these stories accumulated meaning and grew, organically shifting and changing in response to the demands of the life circumstances of each new generation. Thus it is that we receive the myths and legends of old with equal amounts of suspicion and reverence — suspicion regarding the ways in which the idiosyncrasies of those who came before us might be immortalized within these stories, and reverence owing to the accumulated wonder of the ages which can be heard to echo within these ancient tales.
Prior to the invention of writing, we were therefore engaged in an ongoing game of telephone, where the continual expression and re-expression of a story as it was passed down the line of an oral tradition resulted in a curious collaboration between the individual and the story through the progressive retelling that must naturally occur as the generations of descendants cascade. This results in a slow shift away from the cultural context in which the story was first conceived, a shift which produces a corresponding transformation in how the meaning of the story is understood, such that the ideas which were originally expressed in the story undergo a developmental digression that somehow reveals equally as much, if not more, than it conceals.
After the inception of writing, however, we gained the capacity to carve out our concepts in stone, preserving exactly as the original speaker intended the precise utterances they would have chosen to use to express the ideas and sentiments they wished to convey. This ensured that we received those profound ideas from the great men of old with an absolute minimum of interference from those who passed on that knowledge to us, but this was at the expense of the kind of progressively developed insight which is an inherent component of the prior paradigm. Of course, one can read a commentary on a piece of work, and there can indeed exist a chain of commentary which seeks to build a similar kind of progressive understanding, however it is not as if the commentary on the ideas is embedded in and therefore intertwined with the content of the original work as it was in the case of an oral tradition.
This is quite reminiscent of the lines from Plato’s Phaedrus, elaborated in one of Derrida’s works; writing is given a mythic origin wherein it is said to be a ‘pharmakon’ — a medicine or remedy for the problem of forgetfulness. Another way to translate this section of the work would be that the Egyptian god Thoth, who Plato refers to in his work as the inventor of writing, intended written language as a formula or recipe to fortify both memory and wisdom. Unfortunately, as is the case for all drugs, modern and primitive alike, the medicine is a double-edged sword — it cuts both ways, and too much of a good thing can become a bad thing before you know it. Thus, the pharmakon of writing was said to be both poison and cure at once because, although writing enables us to preserve our thoughts and ideas, protecting them from the erosion which inherently comes with the inexorably flowing sands of time, it enables us at the exact same time to neglect our natural faculty for memory because it is no longer necessary to exercise it in the way that our ancestors were forced to. Thus it is that the exact thing which promises a foolproof form of memory may have somehow made us more forgetful overall, rather than less. Quite a curious conundrum, isn’t it?
If this hypothesis, made in the time of the ancient Greeks, were true, what would that mean for those of us who live today? What, pray tell, might we have forgotten, and indeed forgotten that we have forgotten, that our ancestors might have known as intimately as they knew the back of their own hands? What has been forgotten, in many cases, is the actual import of the stories, that important moral meaning which animates our desire to tell them and to hear them be told by others. More important than this, however, is the depth of understanding which was our natural inheritance for the longest time, a knowledge known but unknown, unremembered but never forgotten.
These are the connections that we sought to evoke with the old memory systems, seen today as little more than compilations of hypothetical correspondences between factors which we now believe we know to be causally disconnected phenomena. Today, such systems are regarded as outdated superstitions, relics of a bygone era when man was ignorant about the nature of the world. Could it be, however, that this superficial dismissiveness with which we characterize these ideas that held such resonant relevance throughout the centuries is really the manifestation of the exact forgetfulness which was once prophesied for us?
In short, we have lost our feeling for the great mystery, and we have forgotten why we tell each other the stories which captivate and enchant both children and adults alike. We are so convinced today of our knowledge, all our formulae and facts written down in books stacked high towards the heavens — more books than you or I could ever even count in our lifetime — that we no longer pause to ponder what these ancient peoples might have been thinking, and why they found these secret sympathies so profound and illuminating.
There is an enigmatic aura, the faintest impression of numinosity, which surrounds particularly significant books most intensely, although it subtly clings to all books. It is as if the books are the secret keepers of knowledge, and just as the name of every sincerely searching soul is said to have been written in the book of life since before the beginning, so too are the secrets belonging to the deepest and most arcane elements of the past preserved into the present through the production of a codex which alternately conceals or reveals depending upon the quality of the mind of the reader. A book is symbolic of the distilled wisdom of generations, as it contains exactly that which was considered an imperative to remember. Of course, these days the availability of printing technology has significantly diluted this impression, as tome after tome are produced containing little to nothing which is worthy of being preserved into the unfolding flower of the future. It is the rare books, then — which were the rule once upon a time, when the only books that would survive were those containing profound ideas — to which we must turn if we wish to see this aura of which I speak.
These rare books are like uncut gemstones hiding amidst the shells and sand on a great white beach which stretches from horizon to horizon; one might never come across one in their whole lifetime, and if they did they could be forgiven for passing it over in silence and failing to recognize it as precious. These stones are unremarkable and dull only because they have not yet been cut down to size and polished to perfection by the continuous process of turning them over in one’s mind, and the more precious the stone has the potential to be, the more difficult it is to see that this would be worth the effort. This effort, however, makes all the difference, just as it does in the famous pop-psychology experiment where a font which is more difficult to read causes the proportion of participants who correctly recall the content to rise significantly, the increased investment of attention resulting in the elevated extraction of meaningful insight where otherwise there is only a superficial treatment of the material.
Prior to being polished, such a gem is cloudy and indistinct rather than sharp and illuminating, and even the most astute individual would struggle to penetrate its depths and divine the secrets reflected within. It is this polishing process which was once built into our storytelling paradigm that we have forgotten the importance of, because now we walk along the beach absentmindedly, picking up pretty shells and admiring them without ever realizing that the sands are littered with true treasures for those who have eyes to see them. Perhaps we have even forgotten the story of how we came to find ourselves on this beach, where the ocean meets the land, under the cool light of the moon or the bright light of the sun. Do you remember what we once wrote in the sand?
Writing allows us to take the magic of language and make it manifest in a concrete and enduring form, giving it a permanence and fixedness which stands in contrast to the perpetual flux of conceptual comprehension and perceptual apprehension. This is the basis of our social contracts, which are quite literally written into law and thereby become a fixture of our society, setting the boundaries of our interactions with one another beyond which we may not go. Yet writing has a more profound part to play in the drama of life than a mere tool by which we record the rules to which we have all agreed: it facilitates the organization and articulation of ideas — a crucial stage in their development — and consequently it is a process that effectively transforms a lump of coal into a beautiful and radiant diamond. This is the process of crystallization, which, though begun by speaking, can only be completed and consecrated through the written word.
This brings to mind a unique experience that I have sometimes when I am writing my poems, wherein the activity of trying to crystallize the idea I have in mind within the specific meter and rhythm of a particular poem results in an extremely intriguing phenomenon. There begins a subtle form of collaboration between myself and the poem, such that the unfolding piece of poetry is neither wholly what I intended nor simply a repetition of what has already been written, but becomes something of a mixture between the two. In other words, the words which are selected are guided both by what I intend to express and by those which have already been set down upon the page, and the poem sometimes takes a direction and a tone which were not intended by me, but rather emerged organically as I write out of the intersection between my efforts and the latent mood evoked and articulated by the poem.
This process of collaboration of which I speak permits the creation of powerful portals through which can be glimpsed the subtle secrets that have been forgotten by our surface level minds, which no longer appreciate the deep connections between memory and understanding. These portals are the rare books of which I spoke, and they require deep and careful study by way of repeated readings which facilitate quite complete absorption of the written material into the mind of the reader, such that the book is no longer necessary: only then can the portal be activated, and the deepest insights accessed. It is almost as if the world itself wants us to know its secrets, but will not reveal them to any who will not prove themselves worthy of knowing. The question then becomes, I suppose, how to remember that we were worthy all along, and how to discover what has been forgotten in the ages that have passed since the Greeks heard the whispers of the world. How, in other words, are we to hear the voice of the forest and the wind and the rain? Where do we look, and to what do we listen, if we truly wish to discover the hidden destiny that life has in store for us as a species?
If you are like me, dear reader, and you seek a truth which you cannot quite conceptualize but which you know is all around you, hidden in plain sight, then look no further than those books which you consider most significant. Read them and re-read them, and try to imagine how the story you are being told might be real. The secrets of signification will only ever reveal themselves to someone who is willing to ask the right questions. As I always like to say, the wisdom is hidden only from he who thinks he is above the search. So, lower yourself and be like a child again, and read that book like you aren’t sure if it might be true or not. Then, go to bed and dream. The answers will come to you — they always do, in the end. Then the question will be simple: do you believe in your dreams, or not?
Thank you for reading.
