Convolution

[lhexa]

When asked to criticize my writing, a friend once described it as convoluted, abstract and irrelevant. I know how to deal with two of those criticisms. Irrelevance results from the purpose of this journal: it is written to myself, and the prose takes a form that another can read only because I recognize the risks of involution. As my purpose changes, in other places or formats, what I write acquires relevance to others. Abstraction, a more serious flaw, can be corrected, both by training myself in writing about the concrete and by studying authors who can couch abstractions in material terms, Thoreau being, to my mind, the most skilled at that task. Convolution, however, is a flaw that I know how to avoid or work around, at much cost, but not fix outright. The fact that I often savor it -- my favorite entries from this journal are also the most convoluted -- indicates a problem more complex than a bad habit or a self-indulgence, one which I must come to understand before this writing will be of use to anyone but myself.

I do not think that my style can fail for being the expression of someone lost. The entities which interest me may aptly be called natural mazes; such are a wilderness, a city, a personality, a clique and a mathematics. They all have their sudden cul-de-sacs, unexpected connections, stretches of uniformity, and variety of ways. An unguided, which is to say an individual, path through such a subject will be convoluted, though such complexity can be reduced by traversing a path many times, shortening it and learning it well. I do not know what to relate of my trips through those mazes. These images are not ones in which I can describe the whole of my writing, just the convolution therein. Some writers describe a reliable path through, or into -- in any case, also out of -- the subject, some merely describe their favored destinations, and a few will, kindly but extravagantly, tell you to lose yourself there. What I can say is that if you explore it earnestly, you do not lose yourself only once in such a labyrinth.

Moments of complete directionlessness (call them dead ends reached) have their awkward, abrupt places in my writing. Unguided investigation, understanding it as I do to be unguided exploration, repeatedly arrives at a point where the path disappears, the walls loom unbroken, or the equations do not reduce. So why should these dead ends have any place; why not just give the origin, destination, and the best route connecting the two? -- An introduction, conclusion, and body, to use another parlance. I give my halted steps because error, corrected error rather, has its place in knowledge. The student who reaches a dead end in a problem, calculates there needlessly and at length, backs up, and takes a different approach has thereby gained knowledge that the checker of tables cannot appreciate, and it is not always the same sojourner who returns from a long delay. Those ideas which I can bring myself to think, yet not think through, are the ones that affect me most; moreover, if the moment is one of being lost, they sometimes bring me to the point of alteration. And there are times when my steps guide me unfailingly to nowhere. They guide me to a place of outer stillness and inner change. My most necessary transformations occur in these secluded places of one approach, and can neither be chronicled nor related. They occur in those places where having gone one can only come back.

What makes its way, after much time, into writing is not the error itself but something gained from it; to indulge myself in math wordplay, the product of transformations is the transformation of a convolution. Perhaps I may soon become skilled enough that every convolution in style is an altered form of a convolution in life and thought, tracking the uncommon turns, transitions and connections valuable in my own. What's more, I feel that there is justification for this representation, though I cannot yet articulate it. For now it will have to suffice that there is never just one proof of a theorem, that unlike facts often have a common import, and that a running animal omits steps.

The style of writing (a worthy one, best for many purposes) most antithetical to my own emphasizes clarity, detail and easy perusal, training writers whose greatest virtues reside in anticipating a reader's response. But one of the needs which underlies my convolution -- a more important one than personal changes, or faithfulness to the subject -- is the need for completion, for the ability to stop writing. If I speak unwisely I will always need to say more. Rather I would like to write compactly, pressing as much experience and significance into each sentence as I can, not contenting myself with one or even two meanings, until I am exhausted in the recounting and have exhausted my meaning. If I were to attempt a clear style, even an academic one, I would be forced to write at far greater length than I desire. In attempting a multiplicity of purposes and approaches I err on the side of convolution, where I once erred on the side of longwindedness, before I learned that the boundary I can walk in two paragraphs I can jump in one sentence, leaving the reader's path undecided.

Today resembles yesterday: years past still cling. I awake as though not yet human into a cold moment, my friends the morning dew on my coat, soon to be shaken off. Telling myself that today I will be less untrue, I slowly prepare stiff limbs for a day of things I will not say. The light now dawning through my eyelids gives reminder of how far I have gone afield, and how much ground remains to be covered before I can again deserve rest. An eternity has created the day before me, and the day will create a new eternity. Be they the shine in my fur, my friends will await my return, I think, my next night; but for now I am not for them.

Comments

[guilen.livejournal.com]

I'm of the mind that you have a very unique and personable style, a complete voice if you will, and if it is in fact a voice that is growing, then so be it. It seems to me that people that are so succint to be able to offer an opinion like your friend has is simply excellent at comparing it to what he is familiar with, not so much take it at its own character. Perhaps it -is- fair to call the things he mentioned flaws in the sense that you are willing to agree with him in your own way... the same thing happened to me with music, when the person I looked up to refused to accept some of my stylings, I was forced to peruse them internally and come to understand how I agreed and disagree severally. And I -did- agree and disagree. The hard truth is if you want to be really good at what you do, at your voice (and music and writing and all things art really do boil down to your voice), then you really do need to see all those aspects, but you also do need to be able to stick out, refine, and defend to the death the things that make you so original about it in any case. After all, how could anything new come out if opinions like that were allowed full reign? But I have a deep suspicion that you know that, and that I'm acting as an echo device...

In any case.
My opinions on his comments.

A) Irrelevant, as you are pointing out, is bound to the communicability of what you are saying to the groups that are hearing... certainly while on the up and up, an artist can really only seem to speak to other artists on the same plane of "I'm improving", and so people that are expecting artists to speak to "normal people" I'm not surprised to hear would cconsider such a language irrelevant. For my own sake, nothing helps me practice the art of living so much as the constant retreading of the obvious in its many prismic forms. Then once something original is prepared to bound forward there's a much stronger voice to support it with. The same could be said about what I'm writing now... I could be hitting a checklist of things you've thought a million times, and it could be irritating, but I'm willing to take the chance based on two possible outcomes 1) that you benefit from some small portion of what I'm saying and 2) that my communicating these things to you helps me articulate these ideas to myself as well (as well as articulating further to myself just what you meant by bouncing my opinion off of it). In that sense irrelevance is irrelevant... it doesn't matter that it doesn't matter. In some small way it always does.

B) Abstract. Well. I love abstract ANYTHING. For several reasons too. First of all, abstraction is the language of nature in the state of existence, so communicating ideas in an abstract way I believe to be an effort of communicating ideas in the language of identification, which most people have worked very hard to turn themselves away from. This is a funny example, but think of the way women talk to each other with their eyes. Sometimes if you communicate the fractured pieces of a concept to somebody you can find they identify with the same fractured pieces, or simplified concepts. But with abstract it always DEPENDS, I suppose. At least that's what I've found. Now and then you find somebody who is not afraid of abstraction, is more willing to reposition their conceptual perspective for a moment to say "Yeah... yeah I get that...", and honestly I think it a brave thing for authors to be willing to be abstract, as long as there actually is a feeling or sensation or some sense of soul behind the abstraction they are evoking. Otherwise it's just crass manipulation, the appearance of intellect rather than the presence. But you know just as well as I do that you're too mired in that state to be a faker *haha* Being lost does make one feel stupid from time to time, but goddamit it's genuine...

[lhexa.livejournal.com]

It was accurate criticism that I received, though probably not apt, since I was able to shrug off two thirds of it.

"A) Irrelevant..."

Another way to put that might be that I can't write for anybody else if I can't write for myself. One of the biggest problems for anybody except myself reading this journal is the pervasiveness of allusions to previous entries, most often to imagery in them; the content of those entries has sunk so deep into me that I often can't tell until after the fact that I'm building on a previous metaphor. The last paragraph in this entry, for instance: I wrote it (before slight editing) almost all at once in an unusual mood, and didn't realize until later that every single sentence developed a different, specific idea from one or two previous entries, connecting them. That sort of depth of allusion, and willingness to retread familiar ground again and again, is really unjustifiable in writing for others, but for me, and me alone, it makes this journal damned powerful. The hope is that I can eventually move from that personal writing to something more universal.

Also, there's a lot that can be said on the idea of retreading the ordinary... in a way it was what Thoreau got at in his ideal of writing: he said he wanted (from memory) the first reading to reveal plain common sense, the second severe truth, and the third severe beauty. So a lot of his talent is making everyday, obvious descriptions mean a lot more than usual. I don't think I'm up to that, myself, though maybe my style shares a need to be built on a mastery of describing the ordinary.

"B) Abstract..."

What you're describing I would call subtle, not abstract. What I mean by abstract is prose cut off from concrete description, whether by generalization or summary or other means. It's unacceptable because the connections to the descriptions are the only support for the abstractions in the absence of an argument -- and I generally will have to leave out arguments, for the sake of concision, and being able to stop writing.

I doubt I would ever want to get people to simply return to their natural intuitions... but something that would be worthwhile would be to force recollection of how much goes into understanding, and how little or how basic the knowledge is that people let themselves be content with.

I often feel silly for thinking and writing so much about style, when I'm able to write so little... but since I honestly can't practice at will, the ingredients for worthwhile writing being varied and uncommon, I have to make up for that lack with analysis.

[guilen.livejournal.com]

C) Convultion... I have difficulty with that one. Dissembling convultion seems to be the art of stripping away ones references? It's definetely a worthwhile pursuit, and really, I bet you could boil that down to the uphill battle of the artist. The less convoluted they become, they better of an artist they are in their own right, the purer the expression of their intention. And really, the only judge of that is oneself. It's pretty easy to see when one is settling for less than their best though, but on the reciprocate, it's hard for the perpendicularly artistic to see the battle ongoing in somebody lost putting something forward with confidence; the confidence being in "this is truly in the moment, as imperfect as the moment may be".

HA. Opinion is fun. I have a theory that you may find my response here to be convoluted, abstract, and irrelevant, and at the same time, I bet you get the thrill of expression anyway. So it's win-win.

...
Moo.

[lhexa.livejournal.com]

I don't know what you mean by "dissembling convolution." Disassembling it? And, perpendicularly artistic?

The easy way to lessen convolution is to strip out content; the hard way, I think, is (for lack of a better description) making the content more of a world, giving more points of entry, making it easier to take something out... the problem is not constructing my sentences but animating them.

There are, unfortunately, far too many times when I've settled for something mediocre out of a desire to simply complete a bit of writing, so that a lot of entries have one vibrant paragraph, and a rather mechanical remainder.

I dislike perfection in writing.

[guilen.livejournal.com]

ME TOO! :)

[broken-bokken.livejournal.com]

I always found the concept of this site interesting, and I would hope those reading the journals contained therein expect some degree of involution. I read your journal because I'm interested in hearing the inner thought processes of others, and, while yours is certainly complex and at times seemingly circuitous, such writing gives me an incredible amount of hope. It lends credence to my little personal theories concerning what, for example, is going on in the heads of all the people who surround me in public situations, and indicates that not everyone there is thoroughly possessed by point A to point B, perfunctory thoughts that fail to meander past "What's on E! that I'm missing? That chick is hot, perhaps I'll put the moves on."
And ultimately, it's comforting, somehow, to know that there's someone whose pondering on the universe are like a vast ocean upon which the oil slick of my own musings can but rest.

[lhexa.livejournal.com]

If that praise is directed at me, it's way too high.

I'm curious: how does this writing give credence to your hypotheses (and what are they)? I wouldn't have thought that my writing would give insight into other people.

[broken-bokken.livejournal.com]

My hypothesis that it supports, like I said, is more or less that despite the overwhelming lack of insight you'd get out of virtually all of any random hundred people assembled in a room, there would still be one or two individuals with more going on in their heads than what comes out of their mouths and what's pressing them in their immediate lives.

[wickedorin.livejournal.com]

I could never understand a real, thorough criticism of anyone's writing. I mean, there are certain things a person is looking for to improve a mood or a lengthy description, but even then... the important thing to me is a person's voice, how they say something is as important as what's said. A person's voice might not always gel with me, but I'd never suggest it be changed. Just... feels wrong.

Besides... I love the... hidden passageways. Things unsaid are just as important as what's said--the ability to interpret something differently depending upon mood or experience or perhaps just be inspired by the "gaps" in the writing itself... that feels important. Not being lead, but pointed toward.

The whole of your last paragraph, for instance. There is meaning there, both closely kept and deeply personal, and giving just enough detail to let others reflect on it.

[lhexa.livejournal.com]

That's one of the reasons why previous cultures (German Romanticism, mainly) have made an entire genre out of the fragment. I don't understand that aspect of writing very much, though... I can point it out, and say it's important, but I can't make any arguments about the worth of gaps and excess meaning. Maybe eventually.

Regarding the last paragraph... *points above*

I'm not sure voice is connected with writing style... for some people, yes; it probably is for the two of us, so that we couldn't sincerely write in another person's style. But I don't think that connection exists for most.