Monday, October 31, 2011

Of metawriting

Writing allows mankind to develop more complex thoughts, and I can feel it here. Writing helps me to notice flaws and underdevelopment of the logic and it helps me to to expand it, and to think of details and learn new possibilities that would be too difficult without writing. And the most important part, at least for me, is that it allows me to focus on the subject.

But as they get more complex, they also can become too complicated to handle. I wonder how the texts feel to the other side, to the readers who are unaware of the whole process that led to the words they are reading, making them to have an almost virginal vision of what the text really is. It's something that I, as a writer, became uncapable of perceiving, blindfolded by the overloadness as I always get myself too contaminated with all the possibilities and crossroads I meet. So the possibility of the final result being something understandable or unbearable to read is something I can no longer tell.

After all, it seems that writing makes the idea always grow into something different than first intended. The materialization of an idea seems to end up being only one of the endless ways it could be shown in this world.  Due to crossroads and possibilities, the consequence that follows each different stroke, the path that changes after every note and the unrepeatable accumulation of sequential words makes the final conclusion that seems to be always only a fragment of what the idea truly is.

And at the same time, the very process of writing is also makes the idea paradoxally more real and intense. Some of these ideas I've written here have existed long before they were named, and when I've expressed them they finally seemed to begin existing, like a second birth, a second wave of enthusiasm that ensues. So it becomes an obsession, the feeling that ideas aren't official before I have materialized them with words. I begin really thinking of them after they were posted, mainly because I start realizing things I should have included.

So there's the problem that is the possibility that the materialization makes that small fragment of the idea being turned real and intense, making the materialized idea feels limited (and probably why some old ideas feel alien to me already, as the emotional response comes from the word that didn't capture the essence of my thought). And that's how I can see simplicity can be harmful, as expanding the idea into complexity gives room for it to manifest itself fully. But maybe it's when I have it nuclearly explained it creates the vortex, the simple phrase that seed thoughts in the reader's mind (making then the exploration of idea occur inside their heads). Maybe sometimes the overly complex subject is only absent of the key element that brings it all together.

But despite its limitations and paradoxes, what matters is that it's an important exercise, as the best thing it does is to unload our mind. Still I find it really interesting, this need of the human mind to express things for them to feel real. It's interesting how opening your heart to someone suddenly makes the burden lighten up a little. This need to materialize things out ourselves makes the purpose of art make more sense to me.

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