2025 05 26

95-96: Hugo reminds me of Wittgenstein, only kinder.

When it comes to responding to, or registering in some way, the matter of life—dust-expanded sunlight glancing off a hot woman’s fingers—I want to see it as written. That is, I want to try writing it myself. (95)

This is writing as a way of thinking through things, as a way of grappling with reality.

We’re encouraged by the world of published writing—books, essays, blog posts, tweets, “skeets”—to think of writing as a product, moreover as a product that can be used to judge the author. This has a deforming effect on the process of writing—an anticipatory Hawthorne effect.

I prefer to read with the aim of understanding not only what the author is saying, but also of learning something about the author: much more like having a conversation where I’m doing all the listening.

(By the way, this is a problem I have with people using LLMs to write. I can’t be sure what I’m reading is actually coming from the purported author, so the writing is automatically less compelling. It’s as if I suddenly realized I was listening not to a person but a recording.)

Via Kristin Lukes, a short poem by Galway Kinnell:

Prayer#

Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.

I attended a reading by Galway Kinnell a long time ago, and it was hearing him read that showed me how hearing someone read a poem aloud reveals an additional, auditory, dimension to it. The spaces between the words are not the same as the silences between them; the line breaks have visual meanings that can interfere with hearing the poem if the reader tries conveying them.