KBP: I am not keeping a journal—I have considered a memoir, despite being rather young to write one. On the one hand, I decided after I finished contract teaching that I no longer wanted a life that was worth writing about. The only draft that ever surfaced was a prologue featuring you, actually, when you told me regarding Colorado College: "This institution has nothing to teach you. You need to be out in the world." Well, I did that, and certainly amassed something memoir-able. I also wonder if it would be the proper vehicle for expounding my some of my philosophic ideas, which otherwise tumble out either too pretentious or too abstract to be of value, but could be sewn into anecdotes, with humility.
Just writing this is causing me to fail to see the other hand. I think it's the Jain in me that prefers non-existence to existence, or the Socratic that, despite my love of reading, ultimately does not trust the written word.
JS: For a long time I contemplated writing my life’s story as Memoirs of a Moving Target, because the nomadman in me had made wanderlust far more reliable than the usual kind. It never really occurred to me to distrust the written word, which had—mostly for literary and professional reasons—become the Alpha and Omega of my existence. But your opening remarks have quickened a long-dormant suspicion that writing may not be the perfect vehicle I have always consider it to be. And a few rather regrettable episodes have made me wonder if I should not fall silent for a decade or so. Once one’s writing is out there, once it is “radically orphaned”—as our French theorists love to observe—it is cut off from the author’s intent and must shift for itself, often falling prey to readers who construe or misconstrue according to their own lights, or darkness. But before we get too far into this dialogue, let me ask why and how your distrust of writing emerged, assuming you accept the necessary paradox involved in replying to such questions.
KBP: In class you once observed neither Christ nor Socrates, two of the most famous figures in Western history, ever wrote anything themselves. Jesus never explains why, but Socrates relates his reasons for mistrusting the written word at the end of the Phaedrus, where the god Theuth offers the Egyptian god-king Thamus the art of writing. Thamus is skeptical, and for the outset of this dialogue I want to quote his words in full:
"[T]his discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality."
—Plato, Phaedrus (Benjamin Jowett)
The first criticism is forgetfulness, but this forgetfulness has cascading consequences. The written word predictably, probably inevitably, creates codifications of usage: lawbooks, lexicons, dictionaries. These codifications create limitations that discourage the imagination of those things that cannot be properly defined. The written word, maybe like classical mechanics, creates a paradigm that functions effectively provided one remains within its boundaries. If it can be seen, it can be named and documented.
This usually works for what the physical eyes see—those things we render unto Caesar—but what of the Eye of the imagination? Like physics, the language of the imagination enters a quantum dimension. I remember reading Ulysses, and while I love and respect it, I always noted the fundamental problem of representing thought through word alone: we think not just in words, but in images, sounds, and memory. Our words further must be confined to what can be represented by Latin letters. This puts additional limitations on language, as we can now only speak that which can be and has already been written in our alphabet.
Writing is distinct from speech, its parent. Socrates may have disdained writing, but he was a tremendous fan of conversation, as am I. Conversation is the generation and interplay of unique sound filled with meaning. Conversation answers to spontaneity. The words people choose are roadmaps of their thought patterns. I told my son: "Do not listen to what people say. Use what people say to listen to what they are thinking." I could write a memoir about my time rendering to Caesar as a rogue religion, but if the medium is the message, can that ever be more honest than the impression of me one would gain in a quarter-hour of company and conversation?
JS: So much at the banquet of your mind!—I don’t know where to start, so I’ll start with your closing question. I think the medium is a large part of the message but clearly not the entire message. Plenty of your intellectual demeanor comes through even in pixelated form on the Almighty Internet. But I remember our peripatetics long ago at Colorado College and it is true that having a nice long walk-and-talk with the medium in his ominous trench coat (no matter what the weather), combining in both your appearance and your reality Chandler’s Philip Marlowe (of crime fiction) and Charlie Marlow (narrator of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness). It was somewhat easier to discern your patterns of thought when they emerged from your four or five (or ten) dimensions. And so in my loneliness and isolation in New Zealand (for the time being) I find myself mostly in agreement with the idea that a quarter hour of actual company and conversation is more telling—in every sense—than an orphaned memoir cut loose from the moorings of living meditation.
Our present, altogether disembodied conversation must therefore strive to add the dimensions lost to cyberspace: what is lost in translation from the solid exercise of peripatetics to the ethereal transmission of electrons from one computer to another.
To pick up on just one of the many patterns promised in your entry, I am intrigued by the Plato-Socrates paradox: in writing nothing (like a true teacher?) the latter almost required a medium to be his messenger, although clearly Plato is giving us his thoughts, not those of his teacher. But Plato’s method—dialectical, antagonistic, maieutic or mythic, sometimes in the same dialogue [Phaedrus]—clearly echoes techniques Socrates deployed in the agora when he delighted in corrupting the youth of Athens. But can we be sure even of this parallel? How do we know that Socrates sounded or acted anything like how he is depicted in Plato’s dialogues? Is the transition from Socrates to Plato—teacher to student—filled with distortions, inaccuracies, and other kinds of misrepresentation? Even the skepticism about writing you mentioned, although it does seem like something Socrates would affirm, is told to us in writing by a fabulously talented wordsmith. That paradox cries havoc in my ruminating soul. Imagine a story where Socrates happens upon one of Plato’s dialogues in which he features as the main character. How would he react? Like Prufrock?
“That is not it at all, That is not what I meant, at all.”
Or would he smile warmly at the strenuous exertions of his most promising student as he scurries down the rabbit hole of necessary paradox: writing about the dangers of writing? How would Jesus react to any of the four gospels if he could read them? Are these writings rendering to Jesus what is his? Or are they graven images to be despised as idolatrous and temporal, like coins depicting Caesar? Do we really trust—or know anything about—teachers who don’t publish but nevertheless don’t perish?
KBP: Misrepresentation, oddly, is not one of Socrates' qualms with writing, but you make a good point that writing must always be a form of hearsay to the reader. There must always be some shadow of a doubt as to whether the words are what was intended, even when more directly written. As an author contemplating a memoir, I've reflected on how to hide behind my own words and have looked at many a scrap of my own writing having long forgotten what I intended. But the words of Jesus and Socrates, regardless of fidelity to their authors (or alleged authors) have nevertheless brought me abundant solace and insight over the years. Their words transcend the speaker, or even whatever spirit or muse inspired them.
Narrative is even thornier than dialogue when written down. Jesus' life, at least to his followers, is inextricably linked to its story as represented in the Gospels. Does the factuality of a story affect its power? In the case of the Passion, definitely. In the case of Theuth and Thamus, not quite. The point about memory and accuracy, reminiscence and false omniscience, is made regardless of whether their exchange is factual or Plato simply concocted the tale to lend a sense of authority to his point.
I have told young students that reading is instruction for speaking, and it goes without saying that students from homes with a richer vocabulary, who only need to recognize words they already use, read with much more ease than students who must learn the words as they read them. It may even say something about the power of speech, that it can survive its own debasement, that we can glean anything from the Sermon on the Mount or the Allegory of the Cave without knowing Christ or Socrates and without hearing and understanding them in Aramaic or Greek.
This dialogue is a first-hand example of some of this, I think, since we both have experience dialoguing with each other in-person and through writing. Like you, this discussion returns me to wonderful times around the CC campus, but I wonder: would the understanding be as complete without the shared biography, without something to return to? We can remember the sensations of conversation, of one's vocal cords directly causing the eardrum to vibrate, something that cannot be duplicated even over a telephone, let alone across the page. We can never have "return" with authors we have not met. But is that like the argument that Shakespeare's plays must not be performed if Shakespeare himself can no longer direct them? That would be a loss of which I doubt the Bard would approve. The brief dedications authors use to announce books might be what is important to them, but if that was all they were meant for, no author would publish.
But then who would adopt the "orphaned memoir"? I've also observed I can be the sort of fellow that's easiest for many people to take in small doses, so wouldn't a book give them the chance to pull out or put down my written speech at their leisure? When I try to write philosophy it sounds pretentious, even though I've been told I should relate my ideas. When I try to write autobiography it sounds indulgent, even though I've been told I should relate my experiences. Can dialogue and narrative, separately deceptive as mentioned above, intertwine to create something more accurate?
JS: The first thing that occurs to me are lines from Auden’s poem about the death of Yeats.
Now he is scattered among a hundred cities And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections, To find his happiness in another kind of wood And be punished under a foreign code of conscience. The words of a dead man Are modified in the guts of the living. … Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry. Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still, For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its making where executives Would never want to tamper, flows on south From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth.
Mad Athens hurt Socrates into dialogue; mad Jerusalem hurt Jesus into parables and sermons. But unlike us—and Plato, the Gospel writers, and Paul—Socrates and Jesus wrote nothing down, so isn’t there even a greater chance that their words will be modified in the guts of the living? The last line has always intrigued and mystified me: “a way of happening, a mouth.” Does that mean that poetry, ineffectual in the mundane world to make anything happen, survives at its origins as a voice that happens: as a condition of possibility for conveying anything at all. I am reminded of Beckett’s Not I: a play featuring only a rapidly speaking mouth in an utterly dark theatre. In the Beginning was the Mouth. Logos as the original Mouth.
The second thing regards your last question, and it occurs to me that the novel—that “loose, baggy monster” (Henry James, I think)—is the form that purports to intertwine dialogue and narrative to depict “real life” most accurately. Jane Austen’s novels, for example. Or even Flaubert’s or James or Joyce’s. If so, then isn’t the novel the best place to intertwine narrative and dialogue in order to give oneself the best chance of being completely understood, even as the novel dallies in fictional worlds?
Can any form of writing fully embody one’s ideas better than an embodied, living, walking, conversation? The words of a live man, presumably, are not much modified in guts because we can cross-examine, like Socrates, until clarity emerges. And yet how often do people in direct conversation vastly misunderstand and misconstrue each other? Woolf writes about spoken words always finding their target “two inches too low” in the trajectory of intention.
KBP: At its origins, the inner mouth may be the "om"—a sound that combines a voiced breath with a voiced hum into a primal word that contains all others. It filters through muses to individual inspiration. Even Socrates had his muse, and Jesus took orders from Our Father—can we be certain that they accurately reflected that Music, even when speaking? Or could they only hear their muses and angels because they were chosen to be "a way of happening" for them? When we speak, or even when we read, are we looking for a glimpse of an eternal hum filtered through linguistic veils?
As you say, despite the embodied and personal nature of conversation, I sometimes feel better understood by Socrates than by many people I talk with. It's almost as though, despite the filters of thought, speech, hearsay, writing, translation, and finally my own reading and encoding, the still small voice of Socrates' muse comes through enough, just enough, to sound as familiar as my own thoughts. Can writing pass that gift on? Whether or not the reader construes our writing the way we think it should be, are we still sharing—or transmitting—that initial hum and Om?
Your thoughts on the novel evoke another kind of writing that takes every effort not to be modified in the guts of its audience: law. The law's primary concern is being read consistently across time and space. Like the novel, it involves narrative—usually a dramatic chapter in at least two parties' lives. And like the novel the endless embedded quotations in legal briefs and court opinions draw directly on the words of others, creating a new language that gives its writing a unified voice. It is said that this comes at the expense of style, but dissents sometimes reach for colorful metaphors, such as dismissing the majority's reasoning as "the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie." Plato and Socrates were champions of the law, interesting for the latter, as law is an exercise in writing. The fundamental difference is the collective authorship of the legal corpus, and the personal authorship of the novel.
JS: Let me home in on Om. Let’s first recall the ending to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. Shantih shantih shantih
We know that datta means "to give in charity," damyata means "be compassionate," and dayadvam means "self-control." The sounds echo the da da da thunder at the end of the poem and suggest to most readers that the waste land will be soon enjoy the reviving effects of rain. The traditional reading of the poem’s ending suggests that Eliot is turning to the East as a way out of the desiccated malaise and spiritual impotence of the West. “Shantih” is “the peace that passeth understanding” and the full mantra is “Om shantih shantih shantih,” the cosmic hum of the universe married to peace beyond comprehension. Let’s call this Eastern panacea the happy interpretation.
But what if these promising Sanskrit texts are not to be read as supplying a fairytale ending? What if they are simply more fragments to be thrown into the mix—the farrago, the welter, the echo chamber—of the entire poem in all its linguistic and lyric adventurousness? What if the happy ending is yet another version of "the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie”? What if the endlessly clever and erudite Eliot is tempting the reader to open the Hindu (not Chinese!) fortune cookie, but the poem’s last words are really no more than added fragments to shore against our ruins—not the way out of the ruins.
All these annoying “what ifs” suggest extravagant and therefore probably planned ambiguity and compression, the kind of thing for which modernist poets strive. The Waste Land twists up our hermeneutical guts. We are invited to modify the poet’s dead words. We are, that is to say, at the other end of the spectrum from The Law in all its sedulous clarity: its refreshing lack of ambiguity. But Eliot cannot be simply thundering the Hindu Law at the end of his poem. That would be far too didactic. And it would not be beautiful.
So where does this leave us when it comes to language, genres, forms, and clarity of meaning? Just how tricky is all language, especially when metaphors and Sanskrit profundities begin Omming their tunes? Language has so very many ways of happening. A river often “flows on south” to open its mouth to oceans.
KB: I agree there is a spectrum of sorts between the poet and the judge, the wave and the particle, the defined and the ambiguous. The interplay of meaning and language is like rain when it condenses in the clouds. The traditional reading of The Waste Land is agreed-upon, as you point out, but as the droplets build mass and fall, they become subject to interpretation. The same raindrop can never fall on two different people. Eliot hits on this explicitly. In the Brihadaranyaka Upanisha, Prajapati speaks three different times: "Da. Have you understood?" and each time receives a different answer from his children: first datta, then dayadhvam, then damyata. Each time, Prajapati responds that they have understood. In other words, the same linguistic seed, da, can produce three different forms of fruit.
Language thus has many different ways of happening. This trickiness could be compared to the flow of a river from its source in the mountains to the oceans. At the top is the glacier, the "om", solid and eternal, and then the first pure alpine drainage—the mantra, the "shanti shanti shanti." Confluences of creeks in isolated corners of the forest hills become sources of poetry and song. And as the land flattens, civilization pops up along the waterways, irrigates with forms and procedures, the discipline and care that separates oral from written language. But industry and agriculture also pollute the water, perhaps like writing pollutes language. After all, the first cuneiform writing, to my understanding, had more to do with accounting than philosophy or poetry.
I also wonder about the interplay of physical geography and the geography of language. It does not seem accidental that monasteries are built in mountains, where the physical water reflects the cleanliness of the spiritual environment. Even in smaller settings I've made observations about the correlation between thoughts and physical location. This dialogue, for example, nearly always comes to mind near a specific gate on a forest trail on my daily walk regardless of where I am at in writing my response or what time of day I am out walking. Perhaps the trees near that gate, for a few minutes, become Socrates' muse to me.
I'd be curious to hear a perspective on this from a moving target, particularly since this entire exploration of language and writing and genre and stems from our initial shared question: should I write a memoir? To what extent do you think our muses follow us from place to place, continent to continent, and to what extent do you think we must take the rain that falls where we are? How much should the reader follow in the writer's footsteps in order to claim the right to modify the words of the dead in the guts of the living?
JS: By “follow in the writer’s footsteps” I take it you to mean—if I am following you!—that one must at least try to discover the writer’s intentions (or patterns of thought) as one reads, or one is certain radically to modify the words of the dead in one’s own guts.
I think traditional critics and hermeneuts must pay attention to these intentions to do their jobs. Poets, on the other hand (or metrical foot?), are not required to follow in the footsteps of the authors they read, and in fact must modify their words—as Eliot so wonderfully did—to write a great poem. A memoir presumably invites readers of the first category who will be sympathetic auditors, as if the memoir author and the reader are out for a pleasant walk and one person is delivering his life’s story and the auditor is listening for evolving patterns. It would seem ungrateful and even perverse to read a memoir against the grain of the author’s implied intentions, but we live in a time when—thanks largely to post-structural thought and investigative journalism—we are trained to read everything against the grain. It makes one hesitate to put any language out there for public consumption, so likely is it that someone will modify the hell out of it (or rather into it) in their twisting guts.
Speaking of wandering Muses, this dialogue has made me recall a flagstone we both would have seen at Colorado College. There was on campus a kind of mosaic of flagstones, each bearing a different inscription. On one of them was written: “Nothing is written on stone.” I remember staring at this witty, witting paradox for long minutes. It reminded me of what T.E. Lawrence allegedly replied when an Arab said to him that his fate was written in the stars or in the sky. Lawrence of Arabia—that great wandering soldier and scholar, said: “Nothing is written.” That is, we write our fates, or rather our lives.
Isn’t that what a memoir recounts, or purports to recount: how we became, as Nietzsche might say, who we are? We write—including this very dialogue—to both reflect and create who we are. And each new sentence is the chance to add to and slightly modify our own patterns of thought, based thoughtfully on what the dialogic partner has just written. Therefore, our present dialogue will have been a double-memoir, no? But why publish it? Who cares if anyone else knows our minds, especially our minds in concert? But is the unwritten life not worth living? Lawrence wrote thousands upon thousands of words about his time is the desert. Written on stone? Rendered to whom? As a rogue religion?
KB: Sometimes I take the opposite position of Lawrence, that from some God's-Eye-View it would be apparent that everything is written; we just wouldn't be able to handle the experience of seeing it all at once. Just because we read at our own page and haven't yet turned the page doesn't mean the script hasn't been set in stone. Our lives are written through us, will—or choice—largely being a blissful ignorance of what is going to naturally occur. The marionette strings on our hands must be hidden for the sake of sanity—Brahman must wear a mask in secret because after all, what in the universe could be lonelier than being God? What more tedious than immortality? The way I see it, a life is a sort of four-dimension unit of divine forgetfulness. It is the snippet of divine biography for which I, Kyle, have the pleasure of living first-hand.
But if this sort of fatalistic view is accurate, doesn't that make it more important—a duty, in fact—to tell one's own story? Isn't that story—or shouldn't it, at least—be a gift from the divine that is meant to be shared, not for the sake of getting through to others or being understood by the audience, but for the sake of sending what bit of that primordial "om" glacier will seep through? All light illuminates regardless of hue. The reason to tell my story is not because it's a life I created but because it is the story I was given to tell. I was a conduit for experience: a way of happening.
JS: Since you write so poetically, I think the only proper response is precisely this poem.
Water by Philip Larkin If I were called in To construct a religion I should make use of water. Going to church Would entail a fording To dry, different clothes; My liturgy would employ Images of sousing, A furious devout drench, And I should raise in the east A glass of water Where any-angled light Would congregate endlessly.
KB: I immediately think of how water has made it into so many extant religions. Ritual bathing and baptism drench the rituals tied to many a sacred text. The spirit of the Elohim hovered over the face of the waters before anything else forms. I used a bath to explain a Buddhist conception of death to my son when he was little. I would pull a cup of water from the tub: this is the spirit in the body. Pour it back in. This is what happens when we die: a congregation of many-angled light. The cup might disappear, but the water was there before and after.
But I also think Larkin's light verse sheds light on the need for a new faith, a new set of sacred texts and practices: a rogue religion. Harold Bloom envisioned a religion of literature based loosely on the frameworks of Gnosticism and Kabbalah, but the example of Brahman above suggests memoir. Imagine it: the rite of initiation would be constructing one's own autobiography as a sort of exorcism of one's character. After that the objective would be to design the life not worth writing about but very much worth living.
This is also hinted at in the Baldwin quote you sent:
"It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive." And perhaps Dickens modified in Baldwin's gut, true, but I've read many a book where I've thought I could have said or thought something in precisely the same words as an author or character. And perhaps my understanding of those words is colored by different opinions and experiences, but it's at least in range enough to use identical language. In this way we can put on each other's lives like a pair of glasses for a short time, whether that be King Claudius or Gregor Samsa.
Proust references something not unlike this God's-Eye View in a famously paraphrased passage:
"The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is[.]"
I'm struck by how Proust calls it a "fountain of Eternal Youth". Each life lived is a renewing, all people reincarnations of each other. Again, this lends to the argument that it is, in fact, a duty and not an indulgence to tell the story of getting to the point of no longer wanting to have stories to tell. And after that story is told we look for pieces of our own in what fragments have been left by others.