Journal. Fall, windows, mediation, hypermediation, “literary” writing
(Posting this for future me. I’ll be interested to see what I think of the ideas in a year.)
A beautiful day. The birds and squirrels continue to be busy about the berries—the hawthorns, juniper, and crabapples especially. The red-orange fruit colors are superb in contrast to the foliage, which is drab this year. It hasn’t been a dreary fall—the weather has mostly been glorious—but certainly a wan, faded one. I barely feel like I’m experiencing it. In my own home I’d have windows open and let the temperature be what it may. I try to recognize that others are happier with more mediated experiences. I miss direct contact, though.
Mediated—that makes me think about my ongoing feud with what I think of as MFA style. I currently call it hypermediated, self-conscious, sharp-edged, urban indoor art. (I’m trying to learn to curse like Jimmy Cagney—“you low-down, dirty, rotten etc.”—intensely precise; no mere four-letter nonsense that you could use any time for anyone. Not sure how it’s going so far.)
I’m thinking about it especially in the short forms I’m gravitating to, like haibun and haiku and my Sisyphus mosaics; I’m thinking about it also because I’m less convinced all the time by linearity and argument, and absolutely unconvinced by three-act structure for my kind of life, or for the things I’m interested in conveying. Three-act structure is a fine form, but just one truth among many, and relying on it exclusively masks other important truths.
But once you leave those three acts behind, the alternatives you run into are fragments, braided forms, collages, and their ilk. (Of course, lyric poetry was once a perfectly viable alternative to dramatic forms and thought processes. But sonnets aren’t thick on the ground these days.) They are more overtly high-concept forms that “bravely refuse tidy narrative structures” etc. But the company you keep when you start down that primrose path? Hypermediated, self-conscious, sharp-edged, urban indoor art.
I do not like that company. It sets my teeth on edge, and I’m trying to figure out why.
Reading the poems on tinywords or the haibun at contemporary haibun online, the more self-consciously artistic ones seem to have left karumi behind, no matter how simple their language. There’s no ma. There’s plenty of “empty space,” but it’s not actually spacious. It’s full of loaded meaning and isn’t beautiful for its openness. Instead it’s part of the abstract “don’t say anything directly” puzzle that urban indoor artists tend to create, because just up and saying stuff is gauche.
But just up and saying stuff is also karumi—or at least, saying things with a lightness that seems natural. I’m going to switch nationalities and belief systems here, but I’m reminded of Confucius’s Analects 6: the official who is “simple” and whose directness serves him well in his official capacity, but who seems to have turned simplicity into an ideology: directness for its own sake, without the social mediation of cultivation. On the other hand, to be excessively cultivated—hypermediated—is to be precious and fastidious. To have both simplicity and cultivation in one’s repertoire: ideal. Still, of the errors, Confucius slightly preferred rusticity—the raw material, the natural stuff—and I suspect I do, too, even in the inherently mediated context of haiku, haibun, and mosaics. Not an either-or, but a preponderance.
I think what I’m after with “hypermediated” is the idea that in some “literary” writing, even depictions of vulnerability or raw experience can be so consciously aestheticized that as communication (vs presentation) they fall flat. I feel like I’m looking at words through bullet-proof glass. They are many stages removed from direct experience, not just the ordinary ones of ordering language; the stages of removal seem to be the focal point, not the experience. They are dazzling performances. One cannot empathize; one can only be impressed. Or steamrolled.
I’m tired of people trying to impress. From the standpoint of poverty and disability, it just looks like striving.
(Oh, how funny. I felt the same about vans when I was building mine out. The high-concept ones just made me roll my eyes—flexibility is more your friend than perfection in a 60 square foot living space—but the no-build ones felt too haphazard.
Do not think of life in compartments, young grasshopper.)