Thursday, August 2, 2012

The scrawl mnemonic

I must confess that when I began this blog I imagined that it would be an outlet to the frustrations of having to make myself understandable to people I met and knew through everyday life - who did not share my passion for academic and exculpatory idiomatic usage of language as a proven means to make the hours go by more easily. I did maintain a diary for years before, and I still sometimes make notes with pen and paper when I am reading something that catches the eye, unless, that is, I am feeling terribly lazy at the time. But stream-of-consciousness was the guiding principle and even finds mention in this blog's description that I have adamantly refused to change, cringe-worthy though it reads every time I happen to glance at the right column through a perusal.
But the means to put ideas - converted to barely communicable thoughts - filtered by the constant terror of being found out as basely ignorant - to the final result that one sees on the page, hasn't really changed through the years. I start out with a feeling that I need to say something and a bare concept of what I intend to say and then bring together the means by which the transposition takes place. So the concept of voice-driven writing that seems to be the next inexorable step in the writer's evolution toward being a content-creator, is grounds for umbrage to what seems an engineered debacle in the offing directed wholly at me.
It has taken me years to develop a speaking style that is in direct contradiction to the way I write, and the dissimilarity extends even to the communication of interests, hobbies, pleasures and needs that I make based on the platform in question. People who know me primarily as a speaking person have quite a different idea about me from those who have never met me but read what I write and put out there for consumption. Those unlucky few who have had the misfortune of knowing both sides of the spectrum that my articulation affords, come away shaking their heads at a confusing encounter with bare-faced dishonesty, none the wiser for it.
But an amalgamation of the two, the mosh pit of the worst kind, a single kind of expression that never allows you to take back or pause mid-way through a description, and change, add, multiply and always, always subtract from the convoluted smorgasbord that your mind makes you believe is a cultivated line of thought is ... is... is... subversiveness of the vilest kind.
My deepest respect to the views of Plato, Mark Twain, Henry James and Dostoevsky, not to mention dear blind Milton, but I'm with Heidegger on this one. After all, who would I be without my furiously fingered doppelgänger?