'Of course, our own ideas of ourselves are more often than not laced with pure imagination.' That's the interesting thing about writers' claims to write for themselves -- which selves?
I think I'm always doing something between writing for the past version of myself who would have wanted to read what I'm writing, and writing for some unknowable reader in the unknowable future. I don't like to imagine an 'ideal' reader because I don't want to close off my work to people I wouldn't imagine reading it -- it would be more gratifying to be read by someone unexpected than to be read by whoever I might envision at the moment of writing.
I always wonder what people in the past would think of current responses to their life and work. People are always saying so-and-so would be rolling in their grave, or would be proud, or whatever, but that seems so presumptuous. We don't know what the past would think of us any more than we know what the future will think of us (and I think the same thing about claims that anybody in the present will inevitably be proven to be on the wrong or the right side of history).
Yeah totally. I think despite ourselves there is always an object of desire when we write, some person, or thing, that the work is addressed to. Even the letter that never arrives probably had a planned destination. But to infuse this subjective destination with the unknowable, the fantastic, the science fictional is to get at the unexpectedness that you're referencing.
I have this terrible habit sometimes where I contextualize what I am doing in the present as if someone in the future was talking to (or at my most deluded interviewing) me about some thing I'm doing. Not sure where it comes from. But yeah I imagine putting words into the mouths of the dead is a stylistic thing at best and a reactionary cudgel at worst. Better to animated our own furtive selves for our future observers.
Yeah, I also have a bad habit, especially when I'm in the middle of a project, of imagining how I would explain it all to someone else. I guess at best it's a way of organizing my own thoughts, but at worst it's a kind of freezing and stunting of the process, making it explicable when it should be inchoate and more freely generative. I have to start reminding myself to think more honestly.
'Of course, our own ideas of ourselves are more often than not laced with pure imagination.' That's the interesting thing about writers' claims to write for themselves -- which selves?
I think I'm always doing something between writing for the past version of myself who would have wanted to read what I'm writing, and writing for some unknowable reader in the unknowable future. I don't like to imagine an 'ideal' reader because I don't want to close off my work to people I wouldn't imagine reading it -- it would be more gratifying to be read by someone unexpected than to be read by whoever I might envision at the moment of writing.
I always wonder what people in the past would think of current responses to their life and work. People are always saying so-and-so would be rolling in their grave, or would be proud, or whatever, but that seems so presumptuous. We don't know what the past would think of us any more than we know what the future will think of us (and I think the same thing about claims that anybody in the present will inevitably be proven to be on the wrong or the right side of history).
Hi Allen, Thanks for reading.
Yeah totally. I think despite ourselves there is always an object of desire when we write, some person, or thing, that the work is addressed to. Even the letter that never arrives probably had a planned destination. But to infuse this subjective destination with the unknowable, the fantastic, the science fictional is to get at the unexpectedness that you're referencing.
I have this terrible habit sometimes where I contextualize what I am doing in the present as if someone in the future was talking to (or at my most deluded interviewing) me about some thing I'm doing. Not sure where it comes from. But yeah I imagine putting words into the mouths of the dead is a stylistic thing at best and a reactionary cudgel at worst. Better to animated our own furtive selves for our future observers.
Yeah, I also have a bad habit, especially when I'm in the middle of a project, of imagining how I would explain it all to someone else. I guess at best it's a way of organizing my own thoughts, but at worst it's a kind of freezing and stunting of the process, making it explicable when it should be inchoate and more freely generative. I have to start reminding myself to think more honestly.
"the terror angel on the front porch of the sun."
-Gorgeous.