I bet you haven’t heard that one for a little while, although Marshal McLuhan’s celebrated epigram was on everybody’s lips in the sixties. Out of the blue, however, it came into my head today as I was writing.
I have commented on several occasions in this blog about the fact that I find it impossible to paint and write in the same period. At the moment I am in one of those phases when I am writing, and find it impossible to paint, although now there are ideas lurking in the background. The problem is not the lack of inspiration, but the fact that my head is operating in a very different mode.
The writing project on which I am engaged is interesting …. a kind of essay on an autobiographical subject. The interest and importance of it lies, however, not so much in its subject-matter as there manner in which I have decided to execute it. I am writing by hand, on paper which has to be lined also by hand. Every page is designed in pencil before I commit myself to ink. It takes the form of a dialogue between two figures …. between “myself” and an interlocutor. Both, of course, are to some extent literary constructions.
As you might imagine, this is a rather slow process, particularly because the handwriting is not my usual scrawl but drawn in uniform and well-shaped characters, with some of the capital letters coloured, to indicate which of the speakers is represented. The uniformity of the handwriting allows a rhythm to develop which is almost hypnotic. Perhaps that has something to do with the steady rate at which it is possible to breathe. Normally I find that my head is running well ahead of my capacity to actually write, resulting in a chaotic scribble, but in this situation the focus on execution as well as content slows down the entire process until it becomes a form of meditation.
Unlike my experience of academic writing, in which a clear structure to argument and evidence has to be drafted before the writing proper begins, in this context I permit the process to develop at the rate of no more than one page at a time. (Given the semi-calligraphic nature of the exercise, each page contains only 50-60 words.)
The experience is unique for me in that it has developed almost into a process of self-counselling or auto-analysis. Experiences are permitted to unfold in a leisurely way, and the mind is able to sink beneath the surface of the writing and explore the mental structures and memories that underlie the developing thought. As a consequence each page is something of a surprise. Taken-for-granted and habitual actions suddenly emerge as loaded and significant. Obscure episodes in past action become transparent.
Nothing is forced, and I suppose that I don’t sustain this activity for more than two hours each day, permitting the often unsuspected significance of what has already been written to emerge into consciousness, and the next few sentences to begin to take shape. There is no overall plan. It is a question of pursuing each page at its own pace, with perhaps no more than two pages being completed in any one day. There does appear to be a remarkable congruence between writing in this form and the content which emerges.
Although conceived in a very different context indeed, I have never before appreciated as fully the appositeness of Marshall McLuhan’s celebrated claim that “the medium is the message.”