A Writer's Notebook, Day Seven-Hundred-And-Thirty-One

The imprecision of language is an inherent quality of how it functions.  Each word is a symbol with meanings that are agreed upon, but that communal understanding has a certain degree of variation from one person to another.  This is nothing of a revelation.  It is a common consideration to ask whether what any of us experience as a specific color or sound is the same as what another experiences in relation to the same stimulus.  Even more, we know that each word carries meaning as part of the specific language map of the individual who is interpreting it.  The word apple might, in the same context, bring up an image of the fall of man or of a student giving a gift to their teacher, or just a nice piece of fruit eaten earlier today.  In using language, their is a large degree to which the meaning of what is created for a reader cannot be controlled.

At the same time, a writer is taught to be specific, to add detail and make each description evocative of a specific image.  In truth, though, the specificity is an illusion, or rather it is specificity within the interpretation of a certain reader.  The details of the words are not correlated directly to their meaning in an abstract, objective sense, but instead are used to elicit very specific responses within the reader's own cognitive map of linguistic meaning.  That is to say, the level of detail may increase, but that does not mean the image in the reader's mind is a rendering of what the writer imagined when they were creating the work.  A huge amount of the detail will always be in the reader's hands.

Even if we assume that the reader and I both think of an apple, physically, as the same, even if I specify the details, the size and shape and color, the ripeness of the fruit, the scent, the texture of the skin against finger or when bitten, this still leaves so much unknown.  Their are elements that are presupposed in the creation of the apple, in terms of how it is to be seen, the perspective and lighting, the placement.  Even if it is clear it is an apple being held, how many images can be made of a person holding an apple?  The same moment might be seen from any vantage or distance, and these are not close to the details that come into play if we consider the symbolic meaning.  The apple will have associations that the reader alone carries, and some will be their own.  A teacher of mine once refused to read a piece I had written because he is phobic of rats and they were integral in the story.  At other times, a strange and insignificant detail about a coffee shop I used to go to in New York connected with a reader because they recognized the detail from their own visit to that same place.  Even another person who had been their might not have made that connection.

I am not really certain what I am getting at here, not yet, but it seems to me, as a writer interested in the kind of exploration of the ways text can be and is utilized to impact thought and create experience, I cannot help but see this as an essential aspect of the craft.  It requires a recognition that writing is a collaboration with the reader, that the work is not created by the writer, but that the words are instead a blue-print for an experience, in much the way one can consider a script to exist in relationship to the performed work it instantiates.  The work exists in the act of it's performance and the text is not the thing itself.  This raises many deeper questions for me, and I wonder at the balance of control in this, and how it can be stretched or altered.  How much is in the hands of the writer and how much, the reader's?  How can I play with that?  Can a text be designed so each reader gets the sense of a single specific communication, but it is so different from what others see that it seems impossible they could be discussing the same work, and without either reader thinking that would be the case until they try to communicate what they experienced?  I think the real key question, for me, is about that collaboration itself and about how to get the reader into a more conscious role within it, to offer them an opportunity to be a co-creator in a way that feels explicit within the work.  It feels like this is a continuation of the path I was already following, but I must admit I am not yet certain of what it means entirely, though that was also true when I began exploring many of the ideas that have become the basis for much of my work today.