To Be A Part Of It All

I finished this a few days ago so I could let it all sink in.  Maybe it still hasn’t, because I still harbor this lingering sense of melancholic awe akin to shock, and knowing how to respond to such a foreign feeling is perplexing.  Here we are at the doorstep of the last blog post, and as I look back on my work here with the perspective Dillard lent me I can’t help but hear a cynical voice that is already “growing tired with the world” as she puts it in her afterword.  And that’s ridiculous because I haven’t seen the world yet, I’m 23 and still on my parents health insurance.  I can save weariness for when I’ve been around long enough for the world to slap me around a few times.  I want to see much more in my bold twenties than my small cynical box is currently allowing.  Perhaps I’ll trade this box in for a cabin.

Once I get to my cabin I’ll stay put and begin my inward pilgrimage like Dillard.  Everything we’ve read up to this point features humans carefully approaching nature to study it, as if we’re outsiders to the phenomena of this universe that spat us out.  By staying put and letting the natural world come to her, Dillard gains perspectives of unity rather than separation.  If we are able to see ourselves in the things that surround us, a deeper level of understanding emerges in this connection.  This is the difference between observing nature (as we have been reading up until this book) and participating in nature.  Rarely do we want to be the ones cheering on the sidelines, we’d rather be a part of the team that made it to glory.  Why should this maxim shift when it comes to observing our worldly companions?  In becoming part of the team, I’d imagine it to be simple to experience the passion and wonder that Dillard articulates throughout this book.

One of my favorite examples of transcendental seeing/connecting (I think these terms should be synonymous in reference to this text) happens in the chapter Winter, where she watches the birds, and personifies their actions down to the cellular level.  “Could tiny birds be sifting through me right now, birds winging through the gaps between my cells, touching nothing, but quickening in my tissues, fleet?” (42).  Perhaps this is not at all useful on a scientific level, but on an existential level it can be eye opening.  Dillard lets her imagination turn whatever she is studying into a part of herself, as a potential way to unravel her own biological inner workings.  The limitlessness of Dillard’s perspectives makes this book a uniquely delicate blend of science and—dare I say—poetry.           

            There were so many points of admiration for me in this book that it’s impossible to rank which ones are important enough to discuss here.  Many of you mentioned in last weeks post that the style is pretty rich, which I wont disagree with, but I’m not sure it would be in the forefront of my realizations about this text had it not already been planted in my mind.  It’s rich but effective, and when something works as well as this does I immediately find myself immersed in the content rather than syntax.  I did not experience any reader fatigue, but perhaps my bias lies in some sort of love I found myself falling into the clearer I saw what Dillard was putting in front of me.

              Perhaps the coolest parallel Dillard illustrates between the animals and herself is her restlessness for migration in the chapter “Northing.”  She has been a part of nature for so long at this point that she seems to have reawakened the primal animalistic spirit inside of herself.  She does not want to follow her animal counterparts south, however, and hungers for the north.  I share her appetite here, and agree with her symbolism as she states in her afterword, “the soul’s emptying itself in readiness for the incursion of the divine.”  The arctic landscape is so desolate and isolated that it could be viewed as apocalyptic.  Dillard has a deep appreciation and connection with nature, yet she wants to move north where she can stand on top of the world and watch it fall away.  On the surface this seems depressive, maybe even a little crazy.  But at the same time, there is a sense of purity and beauty mixed with danger in the extreme north, and all of these elements are the big picture embodiment of the small things that Dillard has evolved the eyes to see. 

            Well, here we are, perched on the precipice of prose induced blogging that gave me so much anxiety this semester, and now I’m having mixed feelings about ending it.  But where one project ends another begins, and with this off the list I have just a little more room for new ideas to pop into my head, and I can begin writing that craziness while I’m still fortunate enough to humor the imagination. 

“How boldly committed to ideas we are in our twenties!”

The Benefit Of Admitting You're Human

It’s that time of semester where I begin to feel beat down, and my writing reflects my apathy.  I start nit-picking syllabi and try to decide what I can afford to skip while still keeping a high grade.  But these blogs are psychologically heavier than a grade…these things are forever.  There are people who aren’t on the earth anymore, yet their blog is still available to the public.  It’s eerie, and perhaps my motivation is morbid, but I don’t want to be remembered as someone who skipped assignments just because I got a case of the ol’ ‘mehs’.  But that’s just my perspective. 

Speaking of perspective, Rees’s article from Just Six Numbers fits in appropriately in this week’s section.  The concept that Rees is trying to get across is a huge thing to conceptualize, which is why when this article aims to break the universe down numerically it has to start small…by breaking us down numerically.  The explanation of the amount of atoms in humans is an effective tool that operates in two ways:  It puts the rest of this article into context, and it immediately addresses the “why should we care” question from the tyrannical reader.  Numbers in any fashion turns me off, but Rees eased me into it in a way that made sense.  This is accommodation, but a very sly version of it.  All the numbers are still there as they would be in the original article, but it’s the examples that make sense of everything and put the information into context.

  

            Moving to Atkins… It’s difficult to read a series of texts and not hold each one to the standard of the text that preceded it.  But I’ll say it—Atkins doesn’t read as interestingly as Rees does.  Perhaps this opinion of mine was conjured within the first few lines of this article.  “Change takes a variety of forms.” (Atkins 12)  When an article opens up with elementary ‘duh’ statements, I’m turned off because I feel like I’m being talked down to.  I’m certainly beneath Atkins intellectually speaking, but I don’t think that this is an effective stance to convey through writing.  Going back to the theme of perspective, I had a hard time rising to the level of Atkins to really understand what he is talking about.  I think perspective largely relies on experience, and the closest we come to experience through text is by example.  Atkins gives quite a few examples, bouncing balls, melting ice, house of cards, etc.  But these examples are fixed and small, and don’t quite animate the depth of the content.  This article is not concerned with answering, “why should we care”, which makes it difficult to share perspective as a reader.  Aside from all that, I did like something in this article.  In tandem with my apathetic mood as of late, I found comfort in this quote: “We, however, can see that achieving being there should not be confused with choosing to go there.” (Atkins 14)  I know that this refers to ‘random’ chaotic energy, but it seems pretty applicable to life.  No need to go off on a tangent about where this applies, but it gives me hope about the moments where I look around and wonder, “how the hell did I get here?”

            Staying on topic is getting difficult these days… Haldane has a way of writing that I envy, a conversational tone akin to a grandfather passing on knowledge to their grandchild, and by the time the story is over I’ve forgotten that I was even reading at all.  Haldane is the master of examples that lend the reader perspective.  The entire article is wrought with details of creatures of all sizes, and with each example the purpose of the article becomes more and more clear.  This is exactly what I was looking for in Atkins article, an illustration that makes sense of the concept.  Haldane levels with the reader in the first paragraph, saying that he is looking at a zoology textbook in front of him and making humorous observations.  This makes Haldane a real person, instead of some scientific figure who knows more than the reader.  This rhetorical strategy of the author painting himself in a common light lends even more credibility to the perspective of this article.  As I write this and make these connections, I realize I opened this post with the same “humanizing” strategy.  I’m sure I’m not the only one who is losing steam at this point of the semester, and if my opener is relatable, then you’re more likely to read on.  But it wasn’t an intentional trap!  I just think writing is more enjoyable when the author doesn’t have to omit any underlying thoughts that ultimately contribute to the rhetorical situation of the writing. 

  

Unnatural Juice

Since I have been utterly immersed in rhetoric in Kate Ryan’s class, I’m going to leave Gross out of this post.  It’s an extremely useful article, as persuasion seems to make the world turn, but I wanted to focus my word count toward Mishra, Lakeoff, and Johnson.  As per my usual style, I will grab quotations from the readings and stretch them wildly until I’m nearly off topic. 

Mishra fascinated me the most.  I like to arrogantly assume I’ve pondered most ideas, but Mishra’s explanation of how images affect us blew my mind.  Because pictures have been around since my consciousness, I never considered the world before their existence.  “Pictures are not natural,”(145).  Starting with just this small statement, I started wondering what constitutes a picture.  My grandparents call the television a ‘picture box’, which is exactly what it is.  Computers must follow suit, as well as phones.  Then things get a little obscured, and I’m wondering if everything is a picture.  Briefly touching on rhetorical concepts of truth, I think back to Plato’s version of truth, which is basically that only the divine hold true knowledge and humans get a restrained perspective of truth through our five senses.  With this in mind, our eyes generate a picture that may or may not be the real thing, and therefore our very existence may be unnatural.  (there’s the stretch)

 

Mishra goes on to say that, “Biologically this is most odd since for millions of years animals had been able to respond only to present situations and the immediate future” (145).  I’m finding a paradox here, as I type into my picture box in the present that will be published for the public in the immediate future.  This is still incredibly unnatural, and maybe that’s why I approach these blogs with such anxiety…this feels wrong.  This post can only be part of the present for me and me alone, and then it becomes a picture for all of you who read this.  It’s a very strange time to be alive. 

But if this is a picture, and you read it and understand it, this derails one of Mishra’s claims, “The psychology of art tells us that there are artistic conventions that have to be learnt in order to understand pictures,” because pictures are “creations of time and culture.”(148) This is a fancy way of saying it’s all made up, but in order to play our game you have to learn our made up conventions.  I don’t know much about art or psychology, but I know that when the picture box shows a person telling a joke, I get it, and I laugh.  Perhaps my understanding of understanding is shallow and uncultured, but I don’t see the need to learn artistic conventions for the sake of interpretation.

The Thinking Chair, With Our Handy-Dandy Apple Juice

Moving right along to Lakeoff and Johnson, the concept of the apple juice seat was brilliant.  It has no meaning without context, “But the sentence makes perfect sense in the context which it was uttered…and even the next morning, when there was no apple-juice, it was still clear which seat was the apple-juice seat. (12) This means that the next morning, a mental image served as the justification for something that was present, but a part of the past.  How does this fit in with Mishra’s definition of image interpretation?  All that is required to understand the apple juice seat is presence during the conversation, and has nothing to do with artistic conventions.  The concept of what it means to understand probably deserves it’s own dissertation to answer some of my questions, as well as mental imagery, because it differs with each person.  Much like rhetoric, a concrete definition is impossible to reach when a concept revolves around interpretation.  Still, I’m happy to chill in my apple juice seat, watch moving pictures in a box, and recall mental images that possibly further my unnatural existence. 

                

The Stretch

Let’s all exaggerate for the sake of significance.  I do this pretty often in writing and daily life to enhance whatever I experience alone, mostly because I like a good story.  There are tons of things that seem significant to us that seem to lose significance when we try to communicate it, hence the excluding saying, “you had to be there, I guess.”  It sucks to have to say that, because you know you’ve lost your audience and you’ve just wasted your breath telling a shitty story about how you got pulled over by the sheriff.  Nobody cares!  But if you put the right spin on it, you can fool people into thinking that your story actually matters.

            “I got pulled over for the first time today, you remember your first time?  Damn, I was scared.  I just picked up a pound of sticky and I was high as giraffe nuts.  She didn’t even ask for my license! She said that I ran a stop sign, and I was all, ‘Ma’am, there was no stop sign.’  And she was all, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, my mistake, have a nice day!’”

            “Oh no way! I remember my first time being pulled over…”

              It doesn’t matter that none of that happened.  The audience got the main point: I was pulled over.  The significance was successfully transferred as soon as I gave the audience a relatable point, a point that allows them to reflect on their own experiences.

As Fahnestock says, referring to science accommodators, “Their main purpose is to celebrate rather than validate.” (279) Many of us (everyone that will read this blog) are trained to seek out ethos and logos in every article we read.  We need validation, because we read such an insane amount of material that it becomes necessary to rank our information according to significance. 

            I like the idea of writing for the layman as “celebration” because it sets up a different rhetorical situation for approaching the page.  Let’s be thrilled about what we’re doing so that by the time it falls into the reader’s hands there is still some lingering sense of enthusiasm that can be transferred.  The exclusion of some key facts about a subject really won’t matter to most people as long as they are entertained.  I don’t necessarily condone the spread of borderline false information, but we live in the age of TL;DR, and it’s rough out there.  Perhaps I surround myself with the wrong types of people, but from what I observe people don’t think that anything is significant unless it directly affects them.  If self-interest is the maxim of our generation, then we have to roll with it whether we support it or not so that we can become significant as writers.  There is something to be said about integrity though, and many of us college folk do our best to keep the information intact.  Those people are doing God’s work.  For me, I keep the information intact for the grade.  But when I finally enter the world as a writer who is writing for a majority of people who read more of facebook than they do of factual documents, I’m going to stretch the truth as far as I can to convey significance.  It’s immoral, it’s spreading a pandemic of the uninformed, but dammit if it isn’t effective in getting a main point across. 

            In the interest of examples, as Fahnestock’s article had so many, here is a real life one that actually incorporates some scientific element.  This is a prime example of when we really DO need the information, and not the layman’s terms. 

            Brewing beer is a pretty exact science, and while I’m not a brewer myself, I know how delicate of a process it can be.  I picked up a bottle of “Beard Beer” by Rogue, assuming it was a novelty ‘special strength’ brew for the mountain man.  I’m a bearded fellow, and though it was worth a shot.  When I got home and read the label (after half the bottle was gone) I realized this beer was brewed from natural yeast—BEARD yeast.  All it said on the bottle was (word for word), “Don’t freak out, brewer’s have been using natural yeast for years.”  How am I supposed to not freak out after finding out I’ve been sucking on some dude’s beard?  Why would they be so vague with something so potentially gross?  I was compelled to do some research to figure out how this is even FDA approved.  Luckily I got an explanation that allowed me to finish the beer.  Apparently yeast is a fungus (whether it comes from fruit or a beard) and this specific yeast was a combination of yeast vapors that the master brewer’s beard absorbed and cultivated as a sort of fungal petri dish.  Maybe this doesn’t make it less gross, but it at least rules out the thought of plucking a few strays and boiling them in a cauldron to produce some sort of alcoholic alchemy.  Information here is key.  Without it, I wouldn’t have finished their product.

            Although we may not always be able to “rely on the audience to recognize the significance of information,” (279) there are times where displaying the facts ‘as is’ serves a greater purpose than stretching the truth.  When the information concerns anything that may affect human health (viruses etc.) or the way we live (climate change etc.), I’m an advocate of the facts.  But when it concerns information that ultimately doesn’t affect our way of being, celebrate it.  Decorate your story with celebratory anecdotes, and make it matter.  After all, we all just want to be read and talked about, right?   

           

 

Rules and Opinions: Masters and Minions

(1) When I entered college, the notion of inserting creativity into each piece of writing was completely foreign to me.  To define my terms, I believe creativity to be creation/discovery outside of the usual boundaries that genres can accommodate.  I was used to the compare/contrast format of essays as well as style analysis, which is generally reliant on a set of rules or a formula.  Following rules in writing has always been a way to attain the highest grade, but not necessarily a stepping-stone to achieving one’s own full writing potential.  In my opinion, potential is reached by trial and error and experimentation outside the confines of rules.  I do believe that rules are important when it comes to research writing, so that the formats among research articles are similar enough that a reader knows how to find what they’re looking for.  That being said, it’s generally when the rules are broken well that a piece of writing becomes intriguing.  An example of breaking the rules well would be the novel House Of Leaves by Mark Danielewski, where the rules of page layout and font color are broken, among many others. 

TL;DR- Coming into college, writing could only be ‘good’ if it earned the highest grades and followed the teacher’s rules. Leaving college I’ve learned that a writer best develops their own gift by experimenting outside of the rules.

(2) The role of personal opinion in writing is conveying an idea that a reader may have also experienced, and instilling a sense of closeness and trust from the reader to the writer.  With this trust, the writer can lead the reader on and do bolder things than before that credibility was bestowed.  Opinion is a very difficult thing to omit because as humans we’re compelled to vocalize and share our thoughts.  Human knowledge advances almost entirely due to differences in opinion that inspire us to find a definite right answer.  Places opinions don’t do well are science articles, research articles, literature reviews, and most academically rigorous types of writing that is used as a tool to gain information.  Opinionated writing does thrive in context of a debate, where the victor is the person who articulates their opinion in the most eloquent manner.  Also, novels are single authors opinions disguised as fictional characters’ opinions, so I have to credit opinionated writing for all of the writing that I actually enjoy reading.  I’m sure there are genres where opinion isn’t allowed, but chances are that in those genres the opinion is just extremely nuanced, enough so that it doesn’t muddle whatever the facts may be.  An example of writing that should be as objective as possible would be religious texts.  We’d hope that we’re just getting the facts, but for each biblical event there were multiple interpretations, and therefore multiple opinions.  I’d say religious texts are the only type of writing I can think of where ALL personal elements should be entirely nonexistent, whereas other genres probably have at least a little wiggle room for opinions, disguised or otherwise.

TL;DR- Opinion in writing is meant to establish a connection with the reader, writing that deals primarily with facts should have little to no opinion, creative works as well as debate thrive on opinion, religious texts should be entirely void of opinion.

(3) I’ve always drawn a line between the creative writers and the academic writers.  Creative writers draw from personal experience and personal opinions, while academic research writers draw from other’s experiences and interpretations while omitting their own biases.  Creative writers are more the day-dreaming-novel-reading type, whereas academic writers are more the seminar attending, textbook reading type.  I associate the creative writers with starving artists and/or rockstars (pretty broad spectrum), and the academic writers with ‘the American dream’ lifestyle.  Creative types are the ones you want to bring to bed; academic types are the ones you want to bring home to your parents. When someone from an older generation asks about my major and I say writing, they tend to scoff and say something along the lines of, “What…are you going to be a novelist?”  This question is always accompanied by a vocal inflection that sounds similar to, “Are you fuckin’ shittin’ me?” which illustrates the view of creativity as a joke.  Because of this, when I’d rather not engage in a flame war, I say that I’m interested in becoming a grant writer, or a technical writer, and then my future isn’t so dismissible.

TL;DR- Creative writers nourish the soul and starve the stomach through opinion based writing, academic writers silence the soul but nourish the stomach by omitting opinion.