Thinking about the ways in which we understand our experiences
It is difficult to chart the ocean of human experience when we commit to confining ourselves to certain time periods, modes of thought, styles of writing, and generally, certain people in order to do so.
Consider the ways in which language can be a cartographer, and the ways in which languages phase out, morph, and are replaced by their stranger and younger apprentices.
What does this mean for the present Western educational system and the way we educate ourselves?
Perhaps, in order to strengthen our myopic, English eyes, we should expose ourselves to as many kinds of human experiences as possible. Perhaps we should be forever travelling and forever learning as many languages, vernaculars, and mythologies of as many people as we can. We should speak with people and not write to them.
Maybe this is inconvenient and needless. Maybe all we need to understand human experience is to write about it in English- regardless of our writing ever reaching a reader. This seems to be the morale of too many academics active in the education system that we are a part of today.
The difference between speaking (which is better exemplified through script, or, at least, script is the silent advocate of speech) and writing is that speaking is a direct exposure to human experience, while writing is an abstraction of it.
For example, leaving a note for someone on a desk serves to convey a spoken message in lieu of the speaker being absent from where the listener is. The script in the note says something about the person’s speech – perhaps their inner dialogue (for example, “I’m in a rush!” “He has to know this,” “I love her so much,” “I hate this pen”). Regardless, the listener accepts the note as an artifact of, or as a direct exposure to, someone else’s experience.
Certainly, writing a paper for someone or for a journal cannot convey a spoken message (and it cannot because you’ll lose marks). Instead, it abstracts from that inner dialogue (might we call it thought?) and conveys what, perhaps, should be said through podium microphones- what we’re really thinking.
And by that point- where the abstraction must return to Earth in order for it to be understood (at least where it can be) – the weary head of the listener will be bent over a phone, frantically typing script-less, abstracted messages by the tips of her thumbs – what?
So should we speak our mind or should we abstract from it and allow it to be roiled as ‘writing’? Fuck good writing and ‘good writers. We should learn to speak our minds with as many people as we can. This is how we will best understand human experience.