[Newspoetry] Writing is Dead of its Own Hand

[Donald L Emerick]

Writing in Schools Is Found Both Dismal and Neglected
By TAMAR LEWIN
An 18-member panel of educators has found that writing,
which their report calls one of the most important skills students can learn,
is woefully neglected in most American schools.

*---------------------  Writing is Dead of its Own Hand ----------------------*

The mention of the idea of woeful neglect suggests there could be
other kinds of neglect, or of educational neglect, that are not woeful.
I would like to hear the report authors say what is woeful
or not woeful when it comes to us as educational neglects.

I wouldn't have known that writing is one of the most important skills,
for students to learn, assuming it is possible to learn to write, in schools,
especially in American schools.  How can the educators even think that
American schools -- or any schools, of any patriotic or geographic order --
possibly teach writing?  Writing just happens; it can not be ordered.  And,
I want to be sure to say that writing is just a loose designator for speech,
which schools have already declared to be a completely regulated topic,
with only a few degrees of free and independent variation.  And, even in
each such degree of freedom, there is but little room for any amplitude,
even less room for any latitude, as to what might be a suitable use of
speech, that it could be allowed to be free, as it might happen to be.

On another note, technologically, writing skill is a designative problem,
caused by a failure of imagination.  After all, note how the educators
do not refer to printing, or even its technologized equivalent, typing
and type setting, or keyboarding, as a name for an important skill.
Writing refer to no physical acts of mere penmanship by which
a writing is necessarily alleged to occur, in order for there to be
something that might be judged, as residual trace, in an evidence,
after that fact, that an act of writing could happen, there and then,
and that the act had such and such a quality -- to show its being
as having an equality or an inequality, compared to other beings
who show themselves by similar evidentiary fashions of writings.

Of course, then, one says of such writings that they all had to be
in the same mode of fashion, to follow the same model.  That is,
how could one compare the writing of a textbook on NewsPoetry
with the ability, if any, to write a NewsPoetry?  Textbook writing
involves an entirely different set of skills, for there, in such writing,
one wants to be as pedantic as possible, to dummy down nuances
so that almost everyone understands what is said of those things
that are written there, as if they were to be true, or a way to treat
the true and the false, and label it as such, to be believed.

A textbook thinks that it may present bias unbiasedly, in controversy
show itself uncontroversially, and discuss prejudice with no prejudice.
The neutral view thinks that it is there, far above the fray of conflict,
out of harm's way: the risk and danger of taking and fighting for a side
that is fallible and imperfect.  We want to hear partisans not speak,
not in the way that partisans do speak, naturally.  We want to hear
what partisans would say, if they were not partisans, but neutral
observers, dispassionate, unconcerned, unaffected, disinterested.

So, how do we teach people to write?  We teach them that writing
is neutral, that it has nothing to say if it is not either entertaining,
written for the sake of aesthetic amusement, or else pedagogic,
instructional, teaching us about what is true and false, and, when
necessary, teaching us what is true or false.  Alleged necessities
of declaring what is true or false occur foundationally, as the acts
of origins and beginnings testify.  An educated person shows
his (her) education by saying, equivocally, neutrally, by saying,
"Assuming that is true, then what follows as its consequences?"

Educated persons are educated because they have been led
to see that, regardless of the unknown (the causes before now),
the present necessarily has consequences that may somehow
depend upon what we do in the here and now of the present.
One could be neutral, then, by disregarding the emotive past,
in which we were necessarily bound to feel as we did, because,
in fact, that is precisely and exactly what we did sense and feel.

One could be neutral, too, toward the unemotive future, as it
has yet to be determine itself in any experience. Indeed, one
is disarmed by those who suggest the fluidity of attachments,
by saying, "Try it!  Taste it!  You might like it when you do."
And, they may say "You might learn to like it if you try it."
There is nothing, then, that shows itself as attach-worthy,
nothing that stands against the objectification of the neutral,
nothing that declares itself, passionately, as worthy of passion.

And, do they now say, our students are not learning to write,
and this is result of a woeful neglect?  I'd say it was not neglect,
for that leaves free of guilt the complicit system of oppression,
that prefers to declare nothing valuable in emotional outbursts.

We preach continually catharsis as our modern western show:
the American way of life triumphs over cathexsis, promotes
the market place, by making all things disinvested from ego,
making all things into a commerce of the neutral market place,
where value itself is for sell or for purchase, depending only on
present preferences and present resources like skills or money.
We discount all things past and future, into made-present value,
whose terms are entirely set by others, who expect us to react,
by showing our present preferences, in acts of buying or selling.

Catharsis, then, is private redemption prior to market salvation.
One purges one's own bowels before entering a market place,
and, smelling sweetly, one will not foul the pure and clean air,
by noxious odors, farting in evidence of any past attachments.
The neutrality of the marketplace requires a kind of writing
that says nothing much that offends anyone in the market.
Offensive speech becomes verboten and unlawful, in itself.

And, yet they say, "What, do they not know how to write?"
They must learn to love offense, to give it, to value offense.
This offense is what schools, especially patriotic ones, do
not teach: they do not teach the importance of being earnest,
but the importance of earning money, respect, fame, power,
by giving no offense, no cause for alarm, believing in nothing,
nothing larger than yourself, just the point of a pointless self.

One might offend the order of words that writing maintains,
in many ways revel and rebel.  One might, as I said, do time
as a NewsPoet.  Or, one might fashion some language itself,
as some private socialization, in theatre, film, or some art form.
The individual strikes back at society by a transmogrification,
an appropriation of public values for some otherly valued use,
which some see as a sign of deficiency and of degeneracy,
the offense of a change away from certainties of the past,
whose certainties remain most certain when not offended.

They find most offense in uncertain, indecisive, ambiguities:
for then, they become exposed to the writings of a liberty
that they thought they had thoroughly enslaved to an order.
The offense is always some piece of countering disorder,
some bit that bites back, when it should be swallowed:
a swill that is allowed is what is there to be swallowed.

I shall not be brief, in this writing, if time is to be money,
I would want to be rich, or, to be well-thought of as rich,
so wealthy that I can afford to give away these writings,
like crumbs falling from a feasting table, fit for you pigs,
who would eat swill, falling, rather than take a table seat,
and find the bread is a sheet of paper, the wine is an ink,
and a transmogrification of god in self-mutilating offense
which speaks, confessions and admissions, in writings.

And, this they dare teach not, in schools, public or private,
how to offend a God, for it is most verboten to offend God,
or to teach others, rebellion, how Gods might be offended.
The Enlightenment dies of its own writing, darkening light,
soaking up radiant source of its Hur-r(a)ying illumination.
The Enlightenment dies, oh mortal thing, of its own being;
yet, for it there is no obituary written, inscribed on a tomb,
and were you to die, lost in a desert of your own making,
would you have to fear any grave robbers in the hereafter?

Thanks for listening,
Donald L Emerick
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.chambana.net/mailman/archive/newspoetry/attachments/20030428/7530c3af/attachment.html