I confess it is difficult to write anything meaningful these days. I feel compressed by events, none of which I have any control over or say in, not in any immediate way. I know that the act of expression in opposition to chaos contributes over time to rescue of sorts, but with everything else requiring time and attention, energy—bandwidth—is short.
All one need do is begin…
I am working. My productivity has slowed. Finding the value in fiction is tricky. My basic philosophy of literature, of fiction, is that from the fabrication we discover truth. Not fact. I say again, truth and fact are related, there is overlap, but they are not the same thing. We fiction writers do not lie because we are not competing with fact or attempting to displace reality. We observe, we seek to understand motive and create an aesthetic whole out of which some meaning may emerge.
In times when all meaning is challenged and the agreed-upon respect of a shared reality is threatened, even crippled, finding the wherewithal to do that work can become its own grail quest. It is easy to shrug and say “What’s the point?” The people you think should read what you have to say won’t, if they ever did, and those who will likely sympathize in the first place. We must look to those who may be in neither group. We must rely on an attitude of “you never know.” Perhaps this is bargain-basement hope.
But until the day we wake no more, we still get up in the morning and find a collection of things that must be managed, many of them meaningful, to ourselves and those around us. Chores. Favors. Care-giving. The motions of responsible living.
My view is that I have been part of an ongoing endeavor to build a civilization. A civil society. I am witnessing that work being attacked. It is perhaps useful to see those tearing at it all as having a different idea of what civilization means, but I think it more accurate to say these are people who never knew what a civilization is. Perhaps they feel that it is in some sense organic in that what we have been building is suppressing it. I won’t say that aspects of that idea are not correct, but as a whole it is incredibly myopic. The idea that if you destroy the factory somehow better quality product will emerge from the soil is inane, but that seems to be the thinking, what thinking there is. Hitler’s Blood and Soil nonsense was borne out of this, the belief that there was an essential Germanness being muffled by the institutions of civilization and that by clearing away all that some kind of genetically-encoded perfection would grow in place of actual law and philosophy. We have more than a little of that here.
Where to start to challenge it?
The despair of it is that we really can’t, because the tools of such challenge are the very things seen as suspect. All we can do is decide how we want to live, how we want to treat each other, how we wish to go forward, and what we need to build to keep that…stuff…from dragging us down, as it is trying to do now.
But it is hard, because we—people like me—have placed our trust in reason and discourse and the idea that truth will emerge. It will for those inclined to credit all that. For those who cannot or will not? It does come down to taking a stand and saying No. Saying that these things, whatever they may be, are of value to me and I will not permit you to win this argument. Because there is no argument, really. For there to be an argument, there must be discourse, and for discourse to have any meaning there must be reason, and in this fight only one side accepts that.
The nihilists are in the minority, but they have been relentless. We can do the work of understanding them once we have saved civilization. Save it we must because without it, all discourse will end, and then where will we find truth?
Writing has been difficult of late. But not impossible.
The Distal Muse
Writing Of Late
I confess it is difficult to write anything meaningful these days. I feel compressed by events, none of which I have any control over or say in, not in any immediate way. I know that the act of expression in opposition to chaos contributes over time to rescue of sorts, but with everything else requiring time and attention, energy—bandwidth—is short.
All one need do is begin…
I am working. My productivity has slowed. Finding the value in fiction is tricky. My basic philosophy of literature, of fiction, is that from the fabrication we discover truth. Not fact. I say again, truth and fact are related, there is overlap, but they are not the same thing. We fiction writers do not lie because we are not competing with fact or attempting to displace reality. We observe, we seek to understand motive and create an aesthetic whole out of which some meaning may emerge.
In times when all meaning is challenged and the agreed-upon respect of a shared reality is threatened, even crippled, finding the wherewithal to do that work can become its own grail quest. It is easy to shrug and say “What’s the point?” The people you think should read what you have to say won’t, if they ever did, and those who will likely sympathize in the first place. We must look to those who may be in neither group. We must rely on an attitude of “you never know.” Perhaps this is bargain-basement hope.
But until the day we wake no more, we still get up in the morning and find a collection of things that must be managed, many of them meaningful, to ourselves and those around us. Chores. Favors. Care-giving. The motions of responsible living.
My view is that I have been part of an ongoing endeavor to build a civilization. A civil society. I am witnessing that work being attacked. It is perhaps useful to see those tearing at it all as having a different idea of what civilization means, but I think it more accurate to say these are people who never knew what a civilization is. Perhaps they feel that it is in some sense organic in that what we have been building is suppressing it. I won’t say that aspects of that idea are not correct, but as a whole it is incredibly myopic. The idea that if you destroy the factory somehow better quality product will emerge from the soil is inane, but that seems to be the thinking, what thinking there is. Hitler’s Blood and Soil nonsense was borne out of this, the belief that there was an essential Germanness being muffled by the institutions of civilization and that by clearing away all that some kind of genetically-encoded perfection would grow in place of actual law and philosophy. We have more than a little of that here.
Where to start to challenge it?
The despair of it is that we really can’t, because the tools of such challenge are the very things seen as suspect. All we can do is decide how we want to live, how we want to treat each other, how we wish to go forward, and what we need to build to keep that…stuff…from dragging us down, as it is trying to do now.
But it is hard, because we—people like me—have placed our trust in reason and discourse and the idea that truth will emerge. It will for those inclined to credit all that. For those who cannot or will not? It does come down to taking a stand and saying No. Saying that these things, whatever they may be, are of value to me and I will not permit you to win this argument. Because there is no argument, really. For there to be an argument, there must be discourse, and for discourse to have any meaning there must be reason, and in this fight only one side accepts that.
The nihilists are in the minority, but they have been relentless. We can do the work of understanding them once we have saved civilization. Save it we must because without it, all discourse will end, and then where will we find truth?
Writing has been difficult of late. But not impossible.
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