A Writer's Notebook, Day Seven-Hundred-And-Sixty-Nine

One of the impacts of considering language in the ways that I tend towards, at least for me, has been a shift in how I conceive of writing as an artform.  As I have stated in previous posts, my perspective is that language is first a tool of the mind, and that communication with language is a byproduct of this.  That is to say, the mind as we conceive of it exists through language, and the most significant relationship an individual has with language is personal, is about the self and the understanding of the world.  Language is, to use a crude metaphor, the software platform that allows consciousness as we experience it to run on the hardware of our human brains.  Language is a symbolic map that correlates to the world, both the literal world and the various phenomenological and metaphorical realms of our experiences, and is not simply a way of placing handles on concepts in a way that allows them to be passed back and forth.

Thinking of language through this perspective has to have an impact upon how one conceives of using language for communication, perhaps not in terms of regular utility, but certainly when considering it as an artform, and for me, that transformation has altered my focus in terms of how I write, and what I believe to be the possibility of the written word as an artform.  I think that most writers tend to focus upon the language as a vehicle for communication, as a means, but my own view is that my writing is intended to be an experience itself, that the language is not a means but an object to be experienced directly through the process of reading.  The message communicated, the content, is minor compared to the entire experience that is being presented through the language.  This is not only in terms of crafting sentences that are beautiful and that add to the reading experience in an aesthetic or intellectual sense, though I do incorporate those elements in my work, but is about the experience of a reader, is about how writing will be processed in the mind, about crafting a thing so it is not only being read, but becomes a mental journey they are taking through interacting with the words.  It may be this is does not yet make sense, and I can recognize that this is, I am aware, a strange distinction, and might seem a bit off kilter to some.  The truth is, I find great possibilities exist within this framework, and I am eager to share and see how others take these ideas in places I would not, but I know I need to learn to let some people remain in their own space, as much as I might hope to get them out of the box.  Besides, it leaves me with a great deal more to play with for myself.