This blog will witness to the thought process of a contemporary attempt at relevant, significant and substantial literature. This blog will be less so a defined message than a list of themed musings. Relevancy weighs like the burden of proof. It must make its final assertion clear, while making it evident. In formal writing proof entails supporting a thesis with defensible premises and logically rigorous arguments. In literature, relevance requires a central sentiment, theme or message. Lasting literature speaks to the permanence of human longing and affect - our roots and effects. Specific details of a story always form analogies in the minds of readers. An artful writer does more than combine, contrast and compare values. She does so with such complexity and articulationthat multiple broad analogies can together amount to much simpler ones. But which truths last in the minds of readers? Where can the writer find a worthy theme? The tension that will last long as our species, and perhaps onward, is freedom.
The audience freely draws conclusions about their literature just as it does in its sociopolitical and personal fronts. At a political level, some notion of liberty or freedom is central to the most pacifist of human rights movements, and even the most violent protests. Peoples and individuals alike wish for both the freedom to define and discover their own values and the power to impose their values upon others. The balance between defensive and offensive value-pursuit is not immediately clear, and any writer wishing to discuss freedom with any candidness must accommodate for some measure of ambiguity. The writer colours and articulates value through text just as the life of groups and individuals pursues and implements value through their life. The writer's choice is in this way one with the individual and social context of individuals, societies and cultures for whom she writes. The mindful writer must not only find herself in her text, but reveal her affect in what goes unsaid. Persuasion depends on articulating a message and distracting from all thoughts that may conflict. The writer does not tell of another's conflict. The writer does not recall her own past, present or future conflicts. The writer, and the writing, is the conflict. Problem and solution, freedom and determination, conception and destruction - these don't lie in the writer for the text to project. The apparent projection is really neither consequence nor cause of value. Writer, audience, individual and whole all just are. The act, thought, context and audience of a text are themselves manifestations and the text itself must be so as well.
The audience freely draws conclusions about their literature just as it does in its sociopolitical and personal fronts. At a political level, some notion of liberty or freedom is central to the most pacifist of human rights movements, and even the most violent protests. Peoples and individuals alike wish for both the freedom to define and discover their own values and the power to impose their values upon others. The balance between defensive and offensive value-pursuit is not immediately clear, and any writer wishing to discuss freedom with any candidness must accommodate for some measure of ambiguity. The writer colours and articulates value through text just as the life of groups and individuals pursues and implements value through their life. The writer's choice is in this way one with the individual and social context of individuals, societies and cultures for whom she writes. The mindful writer must not only find herself in her text, but reveal her affect in what goes unsaid. Persuasion depends on articulating a message and distracting from all thoughts that may conflict. The writer does not tell of another's conflict. The writer does not recall her own past, present or future conflicts. The writer, and the writing, is the conflict. Problem and solution, freedom and determination, conception and destruction - these don't lie in the writer for the text to project. The apparent projection is really neither consequence nor cause of value. Writer, audience, individual and whole all just are. The act, thought, context and audience of a text are themselves manifestations and the text itself must be so as well.
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