Thoughts fallen by the wayside

It is artificial to pretend that the researcher begins by collecting her materials and continues by analysing them. Analysis is inherent in the collection – it sets the criteria for inclusion. As the work proceeds, so these criteria may shift and this shift is nothing other than analysis in action.

But analysis also acts in a different way: in the ‘writing up’ of research through which the collection is marshalled into an argument. It is not that the same materials can be presented in different ways, it is that by being presented in a new way, the materials themselves mutate into something new.

If gathering material and presenting this material are two sides of the researcher’s coin, analysis is the coin.

But why call it analysis?

(Etymologically speaking analysis is to take apart and divide into constituent parts, opposed to synthesis which unites constituents into more complex wholes. Is this opposition not analogous to that between criticism and composition?)

Research is both the collection of knowledge and its creation – one begins by assembling information, and in so doing one adds to the known.

Scientific method dictates, presumably, that the collection is done systematically. But regardless of one’s best intentions, there will always be a residual element of chance: one cannot anticipate where one will stumble upon a relevant piece of information, and as a rule the best pieces are stumbled upon in places where one does not even think of looking. Otherwise, one would not be stumbling.

And thus the collection of knowledge is lined with contingency.

Three velocities: that of writing, that of reading, and that of thinking through the written.

The physical activity of writing is fast enough. P. B. Shelley wrote that ‘when composition begins, inspiration is already in decline’ but he, of course, had to write with a quill regularly dipped and re-dipped into a pot of ink. Scratching the words into hand-made paper. A ballpoint pen over industrially produced paper flows faster, the accustomed fingers over a keyboard even more so. With the help of muscle memory each letter appears on the page before it is shaped in the mind. Not to mention advances in speech recognition technology. Nonetheless, the possibility that no matter how fast, the speed of turning thought into type will lag behind the flash of inspiration remains.

Learning to read begins letter by letter. The letters shaped by the mouth, clustered into phonemes. It proceeds word by word, sentence by sentence, soon enough skimming the page, scrolling, browsing, scanning for keywords. But a reading that outspeeds the individual letters on the page is not one that recaptures the pace of inspiration, rather its opposite. The faster you read, the less is being read.

But to think through the something that you will write, or that which has been written before you, has nothing to do with the mechanics of characters on a page. To write on the written is to remember this differential.

It is not the poise of knowing, but its movement. In other words, there is a point of view from which the grace of thought aligns with the grace of a dancer: whether they be moving forwards, sidewards, backwards or in somersault the way in which the movement is carried out is what counts. And that even the pauses — limbs or gaze outstretched, trembling, suspended mid-air — are also part of its movement. 

“the wonder of light | coming over us” is a description of spring from Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf that awoke a nostalgia for light such as it is after a Scandinavian winter. Light on the skin, piercing in the eye.

Skäl, a Swedish word that translates as reason as well as crossroads or the gap where the woof weaves through the warp (a bundle of meanings whose relations would deserve untangling) shares a sound with the word själ, soul. This circumstance struck me as no less wonderful than the light that comes. 

Criticism is not simply literature with a bibliography.

Reading literature comes to include, for any developing mind, reading criticism. In philosophy there is much less of a distinction between “primary” and “secondary” sources: ask a philosopher what he does, and the answer is philosophy. (Geoffrey H. Hartman to the Editor, PMLA, 92.2, [March 1977], p. 307)

Hartman’s letter to the Editor of PMLA is a response to Cary Nelson’s article “Reading Criticism” published in that journal, but it is also a variation on Hartman’s sustained challenge to the boundary between creative and critical writing.

What interests me about this particular iteration of Hartman’s argument is that even as it questions the distinction between primary and secondary literature, it distinguishes the two by means of their relation to quotation. Whereas the ‘creative’ writer weaves an intertextual web in which his reading matter is alluded to, elided, evoked, but rarely named (Hartman here calls it ‘inner quotation’), the ‘critical’ writer makes it a point of honour not to leave a single source without attribution. There is even a species of citicism whose primary object is to locate the sources that the author has not attributed. However barren, it is perfectly legitimate.

To write literature is, in a sense, to rewrite works already written. This means to read them closely, to interpret, to challenge or pay tribute to them – in a word: to criticise. Therefore it is not that the literary writer is less intellectually engaged than the critic, or that the critic is less imaginative than the creative writer. Both literature and criticism present us with the results of a critical investigation of the literary tradition. However, where the critic compiles a bibliography, the creative writer transforms her sources to her own ends. Rather than viewing literature as the object of criticism, we should regard it as the practice of criticism without quotation marks.

I rarely travel where the English language is no longer applicable, which is a shame since much can be learned through the practice of speaking without words. For instance about the discrepancy between language and communication. Although most words communicate, not all word usage is reducible to communication – for instance poetry, a careful arrangement of words that does not primarily communicate. But there is also the communication that has no words, built on body language, intonation, social context and the will to understand one another. If accompanied by the clatter of words not understood, this mode of communication gives rise to a peculiar kind of numbness in the mind.

Going by bus in rainy weather is not even half as pleasant as going by bus when the weather is good. If it is true that busses are called metaphorai in Greek, still echoing metaphor’s origin in meta-phorein, to carry across, wet weather bussing serves as a good metaphor for bad criticism. Within the bus everything is functionally the same as on a sunny day, but the mood is damp and bad-tempered. 

All yellow things are related through the colour that they share.

On a different and complementary axis, all things containing the spurt of ye-, the roll of l’s, and the elongated smoothness of -ow are related through the sounds that they share.

The word yellow, therefore, can be seen as the medium in which a banana or a NYC taxi becomes related to words like yes, yell, mellow, bellow, etc.