the mess

I've never been much of a writer. I suppose that’s because I've never understood writing. It occurs to me now so many years later that what I thought of as writing was music. And I've never much liked music. People have been consumed by what writing looks like and what it sounds like and not much for what it really means. Which all kind of seems the opposite of the point. 

If we pay attention to how we think and express ideas it is a capricious flow, an out-pouring, sometimes jumbled and always discursive. This is not an accident of nature that needs to be cleaned up and organized perfectly like a silverware drawer. I guess this is my point. Our thoughts pour out and they change speed and they add or subtract clutter almost on their own. The critics position is to accept the unsystematic and clean it up. If that is true then writing is not an extension of mind, it is an artificial chore. Has it occurred to anyone other than Dostoevsky to use writing in its original form, as manic thoughts, unsystematic? Perhaps N understood this, but much of his writing values the aesthetic and chooses poetry. Russell for his part was a clean writer and he seemed to value systematizing and yet he kept getting big ideas wrong. He did this though to preserve accessibility and social philosophy to his credit. 

The faster our mind, the more jumbled our thoughts, the more polyphonous the structure and the theme. If you watch an adept speaker engaged with others this magic is never more apparent in the engagement. Buried within rhetoric and humor and revealed amidst verbal stops and starts, tics, tangents, inaudible snorts, common and unattractive ahs and ums, the fluid but tangible theme appears. It is the product of social interaction, a conversation and not a lecture, and it surprises. This is what we should be trying to convey through writing. 

I’m a terrible writer. I’ve never really been able to organize my thoughts or systematize my work. It occurs to me now though that I’ve been too hard on myself and that there is value in the mess. I realize that the expectation of most writing is its appearance and not its real idea.

If our goal is to inspire people for more than a brief emotional moment we have to consider the natural state of genius and how it appears and unfolds.