Yesterday I took a look at how I write from the technology angle. Today, I want to take a look at language. While I have little English and less of everything else, I trust this will be a piece which should lend itself to other Indo-European languages.
The core of how I write is purpose. I write to organise and formulate a set of ideas. While this is closely allied with why I write, purpose in this sense is more technical than philosophical. Though it ultimately provides the psychological tool set for me to realise my philosophical ends.
This is because writing extends my capacity to remember as I can juggle more concepts on the page than I can readily hold in a train of thought. Think about it a little like being in a long meeting. An idea occurs to you, but now is not the time to roast that chestnut on the fire. Hold the idea in your thinking, and if you are actively listening and engaged in the discussion, it slowly fades like smoke. But write it down... and you can return to the notion when the moment is ripe.
In two recent articles, I mused on Why I Write and, at present, for whom I write. Today I want to explore how I publish.
I am old enough to remember when the <blink> tag was used not as a retro pose, or to be ironic, and when sending a newsletter meant formatting your text in <html>. While there are some things about the wild west days of the net I do not miss (no CSS for one), there are others I lament. Such as being able to write without a dizzying array of formatting tools or those bloody 'upgrade to premium' notifications. Just me, my readers and the text.
#onthisday in 1373, an anchoress, known as Mother Juliana, recovered from an illness during which she experienced sixteen visions of Christ. Revelations of Divine Love, which contains her visions, is unique not just because of what it contains but because of what it is. The earliest surviving example of a book written in English by a woman.
Ten days in and I have hit what I feared, a wall of writers block. To be fair, it isn't so much writers block as it is the end of a very long day of work, I am mongrel bitch tired (a phrase I borrow from Ted Wallace) and my fingers won't move over the keys.
In such a situation I hope you can forgive a man for not being able to write something which tries to slip loose from the bonds of earth and take wing in the imagination.
Some of the greatest achievements in philosophy could only be compared with taking up some books which seemed to belong together, and putting them on different shelves; nothing more being final about their positions than that they no longer lie side by side. The onlooker who doesn’t know the difficulty of the task might well think in such a case that nothing at all had been achieved – the difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we know. E.g. to see that when we have put two books together in their right order we have not thereby put them in their final places.
This quote by Wittgenstein is apposite when writing about the philosophy of leadership as it expresses the difficulty of the task faced by the author: seeking ‘right’ order while remaining open to this not being the final order.
Maciej Cegłowski coined a phrase which I think should resonate far beyond the circles in which it currently does. The phrase: ‘ambient privacy.’ He defined it as:
the understanding that there is value in having our everyday interactions with one another remain outside the reach of monitoring, and that the small details of our daily lives should pass by unremembered. What we do at home, work, church, school, or in our leisure time does not belong in a permanent record. Not every conversation needs to be a deposition.
Until the age of 70, nothing I drew was worthy of notice. – Katsushika Hokusai
#onthisday in 1849, aged 88, the artist Katsushika Hokusai died. He was not only one of the most important artists of the Edo period in Japan, but one of the first Japanese artists to achieve fame abroad. It is hard to talk about Hokusai without mentioning his Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji series, of which perhaps the most famous are his Great Wave and Fine Wind, Clear Morning pieces.
Today, while out walking, I came across a stone bench that appeared to be very old. Carved into an ancient looking wall, it was dappled in moss and thick creepers wound their way across its surface.
As I walked on, I turned over in my mind the enduring legacy that is stone. From the construction at Göbekli Tepe in Asia Minor, the oldest religious structure in the world built c. 9500 BC, to the Nile and Indus valleys, the Orkney Isles and the jungles of Yucatán, humanities efforts to outlast time itself are evident.
The Fediverse is abuzz... Keybase has been acquired by Zoom. For some, this is an event akin to opening one of the Seven Seals.
And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see. And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.