Meaning (if we reduce it to its regular orotund ontogenesis, if we search only for its semantic delimitations) is the thin sop of communication, of ‘lay there and don’t move’; it is old Mister Unum, the One-God in whose name we fly into towers or drop bombs from dizzying heights; it is language as authoritarian structure. Monotheism as avatar of Meaning must by its essential and founding premise be jealous, totalitarian and intolerant. .
To be looking at the thing or the group of words though, as they get a move on, is to be aware of an image (a presence) behind the interacting combination and composition of components, a kind of hole in the mirror. It is to become two, onlooker and doer, because it is a self-confrontation. Since most of us do not have access to Chinese ideograms with their radicals (roots) and word-pictures where the dichotomy I’m referring to is both more evident and nullified, and as we no longer practice the arabesques and humming thinking and word-for-every-thing-and-dream and image-for-each-thought of oral traditions, we risk walking into the abstract, into the trap of the written word. As the convention of meaning became the supreme norm, the autonomous movements of the means to expression faded in the eye; we forgot that ‘meaning’ can only offer us the appearances of preserving perception and keeping awareness. Reality however (and the words impregnated by it), is different: it is rot, chewing gum, the implosion of singular meaning, the multiplication of loaves and fishes. Meaning made it impossible for us to sleep with truth, where we twin to be one fugacious orgasm.
Writing is an acquisition (of words, understanding, attitudes); ideally it is also a process of skinning and of dismantling (of attitudes, understanding, words). Because possessions can be inhibiting. To take leave of that which forms attachments leads to a progressive reduction of the I, and this will allow the mind to expand and become more vacuous. You need to be involved simultaneously with the walking and the final destination. That is why the Zen master Dōgen suggested we should live as if we were the Buddhas we already are: to sit and listen to the uninterrupted news of silence, part of the imageless action, and thus experience all-ness. And, because one is anyway part of it, to reach immobility within movement and play inside immobility. Our whole being should be as a lung: when breathing out you open and become emptied and the interior flows away and perishes so that you are at one with the totality, the void; when inhaling everything around you and outside you enters to become part of you. There are thus two movements, a duality, a come and a go — both integrated in the coming-and-going, so that there can be movement without movement, an un-danced dance, quietness without stopping. Everything/reality is a lung and you are being inhaled and exhaled.
It is truly a dance. You and your ultimate opponent, the shadow-self, move together like water in the wind. Keep the neck straight; it must be as if the crown of your head were attached to a navel string from heaven; and when you lift your hands, like this, feel then the wrists hoisted by threads: when you open your palms upward you must be holding twin birds, which can neither stay nor fly away. Relax the belly, particularly the hip joints, straighten your back without stiffening: the chi should circulate freely — when it is not hindered you will experience the palms of your hands becoming warm as if a mild breath blew against them, ruffling the birds’ feathers.
In the mind also, you become aware of space when it is suggested neither by the presence nor the absence of objects but by their ending (nirodha). A triangle is not circumscribed by three lines but by the three edges where triangularity breaks off.
Like this you are unconsciously concentrated, on your guard and ready without any rigidity. And like this too, in your writing, you will obtain the ‘relaxed tension’ of a flowing alertness. You will need it as you see your text taking body, in order not to take fear. Because you are finally your own enemy.
Writing through the ‘self,’ whoever she may be, need not be a limitation (and I have suggested elsewhere that one is always walking the road of “writing the self and rewriting the world” — that is, you invent the self and reshape the observed outside and other out there to some form of understanding). We are writing from nothingness, at best through ‘self’ as conduit of consciousness, while we all carry within us an infinity of characters and mutations and stories. The mind-hand combination — here I again equate ‘hand’ with ‘writing’ — operates like a mirror, which can be held up to all kinds of situations and to all four faces of the earth.
A beautiful woman I once knew (her name was Leah), who lived the pain of not writing her life, referred to this infinity of openings as “the nation of images.” (I bring her into this unmade text as into my soiled bed because movement knows no hierarchy.) You may be reticent about what to use, sensitive about impairing your relations with people close to you, of staining the sheets of paper, but for all practical purposes you are quite an unscrupulous magpie, filching whatever shiny object attracts the attention. What goes into the word-grinder is, as well, the writing itself — I mean, the fact (or fiction) of leading a writing life. As you use your senses to mediate the world in which you move, so you employ writing as a further sense — both to correlate the physical ones and to negotiate some kind of peace process between your fortified experiences or prejudices and the nascent ‘self’ as liberation movement.
Does exploring (and exploiting) the ‘coming-to-self’ as means and as material imply that one has only the ego to go by? No, I certainly don’t think so. Writing has enough of an ‘outside-ness’ to it — its own volition and laws, its desire to come about — for you not to be confined to fumbling (for) yourself in a self-reflecting darkroom. In any event, as I’m suggesting, the ego is but a repository for an ongoing process of coming to consciousness informed by both outside and inner events, a station hall for many selves and shouts, a shard of that big mirror we call life.
(mirror note 2)
Slowly now, what about the counter-arguments? Ernest Gellner wrote a book, Language and Solitude, in which he challenges many of the assumptions of Malinowski and particularly Wittgenstein on language. There’s a chapter, “The case of the disappearing self,” where he quotes David Hume: “For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other. . I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. . I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.” Kant as well (we’re told) held that there is nothing abiding except the “I,” which is simple solely because its representation has no content. . All of this preceded and influenced Wittgenstein, who wrote in his Tractatus Logico-Philosphicus: “If I write a book called The World As I Found It, I should have to include a report on my body, and should have to say which parts were subordinate to my will, and which were not, etc., this being a method of isolating the subject, or rather of showing that in an important sense there is no subject; for it alone could not be mentioned in that book.” And thus: “The self of solipsism shrinks to a point without extension, and there remains the reality co-coordinate with it.” Gellner then observes (and I quote snippets): “It is quite obvious what has happened. The empiricist insistence on refraining from trespass beyond the immediate data ends up by eliminating both an independent world and an independent, persisting self. Both dissolve and, moreover, flow into each other, and both disappear. The solitude is total. This surely was the problem, and not a solution, for Wittgenstein. He was not seeking a bolt hole from Kakania, he was looking for an escape from the bolt hole. . The one and only alternative theory of meaning, by contrast, promised and provided liberation from this solitude, and a kind of guaranteed gregariousness. Language as a mirror of reality led to loneliness; language as a cultural function led to community. . [But] Wittgenstein never pointed to any actual historically existing culture, such as Kakania. Examples continued to be conspicuous by their absence. . In the end, culture was treated as ultimate, as a kind of new ultimate visual field. So the solitude of the visual field (co-extensive with both self and world) is replaced by the solitude of culture. .”