For me, a text is an aural experience first, and the first bits of meaning I get from words and sentences are not visual, even if the word itself has a visual meaning: the phrase the blue room to me is first its related vowel sounds, then a meaning that it’s hard to represent with words, but is basically “a space of color” (with the room part taking precedence in my mind, the actual color blue nowhere in sight yet), then finally a vague visual image in my mind, sort of like you’d get in one of the first computer games to have graphics, or in a really basic CAD drawing. If the room becomes an important part of the paragraph or page, I’ll probably visualize one of the four or five prop rooms I keep in my memory: the living room at a childhood friend’s house, an apartment I once lived in, a set from a movie I’ve watched a lot, etc. (One of the reasons I think I respond so strongly to movies is that they allow an experience I can’t get from reading — a visual experience.)
How we read determines, I expect, a lot about what we read. My indifference to Victorian novels comes partly from my indifference to scenes that are described in detail; because my brain doesn’t create vividly visual scenery, all the detail is clotting matter. (I love the first pages of Bleak House because of the rhythms of the fragmented sentences, but that’s enough for me. I wouldn’t want to read an entire book written that way, and the rest of Bleak House makes my brain feel like my stomach would if I ate a couple pounds of pure cholesterol.) Dialogue, though, is something I respond strongly to because the first thing my brain does with text is imagine sound from it. This is also one of the reasons I’m a fairly slow reader — to read quickly, you can’t be hearing all the words.
Often, it seems, we turn our ways of reading into prescriptions for reading: because I read this way, it is a meaningful and good way to read — and then we go on to think that writers should write in a way that appeals to our own particular way of reading. (Notice how Silliman equates the way he doesn’t read with psychosis.)
It is not only African shantytowns that don’t appear on urban maps. Many shantytowns in Turkey and elsewhere are also missing—as are the considerable territories controlled by guerrilla armies and urban mafias. Traveling with Eritrean guerrillas in what, according to the map, was northern Ethiopia, traveling in “northern Iraq” with Kurdish guerrillas, and staying in a hotel in the Caucasus controlled by a local mafia—to say nothing of my experiences in West Africa—led me to develop a healthy skepticism toward maps, which, I began to realize, create a conceptual barrier that prevents us from comprehending the political crack-up just beginning to occur worldwide.
Consider the map of the world, with its 190 or so countries, each signified by a bold and uniform color: this map, with which all of us have grown up, is generally an invention of modernism, specifically of European colonialism. Modernism, in the sense of which I speak, began with the rise of nation-states in Europe and was confirmed by the death of feudalism at the end of the Thirty Years’ War—an event that was interposed between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, which together gave birth to modern science. People were suddenly flush with an enthusiasm to categorize, to define. The map, based on scientific techniques of measurement, offered a way to classify new national organisms, making a jigsaw puzzle of neat pieces without transition zones between them. “Frontier” is itself a modern concept that didn’t exist in the feudal mind. And as European nations carved out far-flung domains at the same time that print technology was making the reproduction of maps cheaper, cartography came into its own as a way of creating facts by ordering the way we look at the world.
In his book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Benedict Anderson, of Cornell University, demonstrates that the map enabled colonialists to think about their holdings in terms of a “totalizing classificatory grid… . It was bounded, determinate, and therefore—in principle—countable.” To the colonialist, country maps were the equivalent of an accountant’s ledger books. Maps, Anderson explains, “shaped the grammar” that would make possible such questionable concepts as Iraq, Indonesia, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria. The state, recall, is a purely Western notion, one that until the twentieth century applied to countries covering only three percent of the earth’s land area. Nor is the evidence compelling that the state, as a governing ideal, can be successfully transported to areas outside the industrialized world. Even the United States of America, in the words of one of our best living poets, Gary Snyder, consists of “arbitrary and inaccurate impositions on what is really here.”
Yet this inflexible, artificial reality staggers on, not only in the United Nations but in various geographic and travel publications (themselves by-products of an age of elite touring which colonialism made possible) that still report on and photograph the world according to “country.” Newspapers, this magazine, and this writer are not innocent of the tendency.
Side-by-side comparisons of a couple of classical Chinese poems by different translators. I do have a weakness for Hinton’s style, but I’ve never encountered read Rexroth’s work before this; it might grow on me with sustained reading.
I need to find one where I can start putting in pics too
New post: Hermeneutics in Everyday Life (http://asaphic.net/blog/?p=54)
