JOHN THE OBSCURE ™
By John Ruch
© 2007
The Unwritten
“Cosmopolitan”
is pedophilia-chic toilet paper for the brain.
When I was
invited several years ago to write a front-of-the-book opinion piece for
“Cosmo,” that, unfortunately, was the main opinion I had in mind. That clearly
wasn’t going to fly. An editor suggested that I write about how men suffer from
body image problems, a topic that on the one hand had some merit, and on the
other was a baldly calculated attempt to camouflage “Cosmo’s” uniquely rancid
contribution to women’s body image problems. I ended up writing nothing at all.
I consider
that non-column to be the best thing I never wrote, a highlight of my writing
career. But where on a résumé do you say, “Walked away from a big fat check and
an entrée to the
I believe
that not writing a trashy novel is as meritorious as writing a great one. Not
writing a commercial jingle has the artistic integrity of composing a symphony.
Not writing cute, jokey, whored-out, breathless crap
for fashion magazines is as important as being Woodward and Bernstein. I
believe in credit where credit is undue. There can be a sanctity in inaction.
I think
there’s a sci-fi story in there somewhere about a society that issues credits
for crimes not committed, social offenses deftly avoided, mountains left
unclimbed. Of course, I haven’t written it.
And, much
as I enjoy declaiming against the ambition-addled urge to do very well at very bad jobs, that’s my real point here: the unwritten rules of
unwritten things.
This column
was supposed to be about the reputed boat-navigation practice of Micronesian
islanders of using non-existent, imaginary islands as tools of “map coherence.”
And you were not supposed to notice that it isn’t.
Perfectly
normal, says the voice behind the paper curtain. Why would you write about the
unwritten?
After all,
writing is a form of theater, a distillation and reorganization of life. It’s
meant to appear suave, self-assured and, above all, complete. And that’s fine.
But it’s all too easy to reverse cause and effect and start editing reality not
on the page, but as it happens, so that we perceive ourselves as living in an
artificially streamlined storybook world sanded free of all oddities, anomalies
and idiosyncracies—and ultimately of ourselves.
Were I
normal, I would simply move on to another topic and forget that I ever intended
to write about something that no longer interests me. By merely revealing that
this column was supposed to be about navigation by imaginary islands, I raise
the natural question of why it isn’t. That is to say, I’m forced out from
behind the pretense of authorial infallibility and re-engaged with a very
fruitful reality.
There are
two main reasons for this non-column. First, Micronesians in fact do not use
imaginary islands to navigate—a good reason not to write about it. But that’s
at least a significant correction to the book that made the claim, Peter
Bishop’s “The Myth of Shangri-La:
Bishop’s
claim was based on misunderstanding another book, Thomas Gladwin’s “East Is a
Big Bird: Navigation and Logic on Puluwat Atoll.”
Gladwin’s actual account is just as interesting, describing mapless
navigation based on estimated positions of landmark islands passed through oral
tradition to sailors who may not have personally ever seen said islands—and for
an added bonus, all of it turned by Gladwin into a microscope for examining the
“subcultural retardation” effect of poverty on
Western intelligence testing performance. That’s the second reason for the
non-column: The book is a fine, thorough treatment of its arcane subject, and I
have nothing in particular to add. I would merely recommend the book to
people—but then, how can I, when my involvement with it goes unwritten?
My main
reasons for not writing the column, then, are very common and sensible ones—but
they also result in significant losses of knowledge. More significantly for me
personally, there’s an implied devaluation of my own instincts and decisions in
the matter, a self-degradation that consensus reality encourages us to undergo.
My failed
quest for navigation by imaginary island actually says a lot about the
contingent, fortuitous method of discovery that so appeals to me—and that we
all engage in, really, as so concretely demonstrated by the modern phenomenon
of hyperlinks. The process began in 2005 when I saw mention of Chinese ethnic
theme parks in a New York Times travel article, which led me to research a 2006
column on the subject, which involved researching Shangri-La, which included
Bishop’s book, which referenced Gladwin.
Once I got
my hands on the Gladwin, I’ll admit I was sorely disappointed that my (née
Bishop’s) imaginary-island preconception didn’t hold up—so much so that I
immediately lost interest in the whole subject. Cliché, but
true. As I said, I didn’t have anything to add to Gladwin’s
observations, but that lack of interest may have had something to do with it.
By any
standard measure, there was nothing there to be written about Micronesian navigation.
Yet there was plenty to say about my own navigation through the world, the way
I create my own map coherence, how I prefer my islands mythical and lost.
Writing
can, of course, become too self-reflexive, resulting
in paralysis or the donning of a new kind of mask like today’s pop-culture
irony with its neo-macho reticence to express anything authentic. But it’s
still remarkable how many things about writing are never written about.
I long had
a habit, since lost, as I wrote longhand of playing with the pen in a
particular way: holding it normally, point to paper, I would slide my fingers
down its length; grip the pen by the tip; lift it; allow it to pivot between my
fingers so it was upside down; place the inverted top of the pen on the paper;
slide my fingers down its length; and repeat the process. Probably anyone who
saw me write in the 1980s and ’90s would remember that. But I don’t remember
anyone ever remarking on it, and I’ve never written about it.
Yet that
habit was deliberately adopted from an episode of the 1980s version of “The
Twilight Zone” that was peculiarly significant to me. The story was about a guy
going back in time and warning JFK of his impending assassination, and JFK
deciding to go ahead with the
I think
this myopia afflicts anybody who does any sort of writing, even office e-mails.
I was using a fax machine the other day and noticed how much I like the thin
wire paper-holding thing on the back. It has this precise kind of tension to
its movement, tight but controlled, moving slowly like an old-fashioned
high-end tape deck opening up. That’s the sort of observation that’s supposed
to be in and out of your brain within a second. You’re certainly not going to
mention it in an interoffice memo or whatever. And yet there it is, part of your writing environment. It’s that huge cloud
of squid ink called the unwritten.
This
process of reality-editing, of authorial anaesthesia,
would seem to explain some commonplace dilemmas of writing—say, the truism that
it’s easier to write a negative critique than a positive one. The lack of
serious writing about such writing is itself a great example of the unwritten.
The truism
is usually itself made as a negative critique of negative critiques. Virtually
anytime a journalistic audience complains about something like this, they are
themselves engaging in the protested behavior. The fact is,
people love negative critiques—except when they’re about them or something they
like. (My negative reviews have a noticeably longer life on the Web than
positive ones do. In one case, in the early years of Web cognizance, I was
asked to post a few album reviews online as part of a pitch for a freelance gig
I ended up not getting. Two of the albums I reviewed were by the same band; one
review was positive and the other negative. The positive one is long gone, but
the negative one pops up in search engines to this day, with some fan’s protest immediately following.)
That being
said, a positive review is indeed harder to write. When something strikes the
writer as bad, anxiety is created and there’s strong motivation to release it
through writing. But when something is perceived as good, it’s usually because
it fits neatly into the critic’s extant worldview. To articulate its goodness
means saying less about the product and more about the critic, a slow process
of deconstructing their own psyche—if they’re willing to make the effort. It’s
a lot harder, and emotionally there’s little motivation, beyond perhaps sharing
a superficial enthusiasm.
More to my
point, “good” usually means conforming to some normalizing social
convention—moral, dramatic, whatever—controlled or created by some type of
authority, who in turn has defined that “goodness” with some inescapable cliché
or platitude. Most praise does not delve into its own psyche; it repeats
phrases from Sunday School or Hallmark cards. It is
despairingly hard to write creatively in platitude-ese,
and it’s horrifyingly boring to read. But before words ever get to the page, a
mental editing process has already happened; most of the experience has already
been unwritten.
Every piece
of writing belies an unwritten reality that dwarfs and shadows it. With a bow
of respect, I will end not with a . but
with a :
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