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): "The more advances we make, the more we forget. What use is our expansive technology in a sea of ignorance? If the situation in education remains unchallenged, we can expect more of the same--with high-tech research continuing to prevail while teaching becomes vestigial and the existing university structure falls further into disarray. I fear for us when there is no one left in our places of learning who can tell one moth from another, no one who knows the habits of hornbills, no one to puzzle over the diversity of hawthorns, no one even to know that this knowledge is needed and is gone."
(: "University of
Michigan management expert Karl Weick has long championed the application of biological models to organization design and strategy. How collective organizational minds
selectively notice 'facts' and frame problems is his passion. So is forgetting. Learning how to do some things well and establishing a largely invariant corporate culture is a must for success. Weick pointedly reminds us, however, that 'adaption precludes adaptivity.' To
establish rituals and become effective (and then better and better still) at something, by definition extends the blinds that limit our ability to adjust to the unforeseen. The way to avoid blindness, per Weick, is to
develop an 'ambivalent stance toward past wisdom' and 'treat memory as a pest.' He also nods to Gregory Bateson, who said, 'You can't live without an eraser.'"
Again, for a successful piece to be readable, it has to demand the reader's attention. If, after the piece has finished, the reader cares nothing for its content, then the piece may be deemed unsatisfying for that audience. However, it's necessary that the reader's attention to the piece carries through to the end when an evaluation can rightly or wrongly be made. What is attention and how can it be achieved? Attention, I think, is a kind of forgetting, or losing one's hold on oneself. If and when the reader forgets himself then the reader allows himself to wait upon the piece, to expect more, to care for the activity shown within the piece. Attention derives from the Latin word, attendere, "stretch on," which seems to show that attention is defined by longer and longer spans of itself, e.g. if a reader can attend to your story but not your novel, either the novel doesn't demand that length of attention or the reader is unwilling to stretch himself that far, isn't willing to wait on it. I believe achieving attention entails enabling the reader to attend when it most seems that a reader wouldn't want to attend, i.e. when is a bridge too far? Since the reader probably has many tasks--done and left undone--to forget, any variance in the piece that springs the reader from his attention to the piece leaves many more cares open that also demand the reader's attention. Chief among these is daydreaming. If the reader can make up a better story about himself in his own head, so be it. But that leaves the story's pages unturned when the reader remembers that the reader is a main character in a story yet to be written. The reader then tells this imaginary story to himself while the character in the literature has been left alone, stranded on the bridge. Therefore, it seems that the character must invite the reader's attention in such a way that the reader will not return to himself, but always return to the character. Normally, a character like James Bond, extraordinary in profession and physical prowess, would seem to demand that kind of attention, since, what reader could possibly imagine himself in daydreams as a spy? I do.
Most writers who assume their own lives and experiences are boring will naturally invent a character whose very nature entails a more dramatic existence--soldier, spy, statesman. When, in fact, if the writer cannot probe this character's depths, the reader is then allowed to invent an even better story, daydreaming himself as statesman or secret agent. The reader uses the character as an envoy to his own psyche, his own deep desires for adventure. Probing a character's depths can only occur when the writer allows the character to show how and where motivation to act occurs. Failing to stay in time with the character's motivation to act either leaves the reader ahead or behind the story, the story being the character acting. When the reader gets ahead or falls behind, the reader feels at leisure to remember himself, perhaps by daydreaming his own story or by remembering that the tick-tock on the wall tolls for him and that he has places to be, things to brew, or sleep to get. Probing depths means avoiding the reader as a person who has a life. Inserting the phrase, "So what's your life like, reader?" into a story is the death of the story. The stance of the story is always, "This story is not about you." While, in truth, excellent work is always about the reader, it never explicitly pretends to be the reader's life. The story always holds the reader's life in abeyance. "When will this story be about me?" may be something the reader awaits, but it never comes to mind before the character in the story has the opportunity to have her own revelation. If the story would allow the reader an entrance, then the reader would no longer forget. In addition to probing the depths of a character, the story that demands attention must have the character act at some point. A reader will only enter the character's dreams and desires to the extent that the reader knows the dreams and desires will be enacted in some fashion--effectively or not. Two things then become apparent. One, the character's desire must be established early. Two, the desire must later be overpowered by an action. If the action does not overpower the desire, then the reader is allowed to act in his own mind on the desire: "I would have done it another way." Or, "No one would do it that way, and I certainly wouldn't." The desire and action work in tandem. No desire should be introduced that cannot reward the reader's wait. And no action should occur that doesn't recover the desire. By recover, I mean represent the desire and make it physical instead of solely psychological. The simplest way to perform this is to have the desire be for something physical instead of spiritual. A quest for a physical thing is much more recoverable than a quest for a spiritual thing. The spiritual thing allows the reader too much room to move--unless the character's depths are much more spiritual--in a directed fashion--than any reader's (e.g. the character needs to be spiritually reborn before he can become a member of an organization; but even here criteria for membership in the organization will still direct the quest as much as any spiritual rebirth). In any case, yoking the physical things to the emotions leaves the reader solid handholds in the story. These handholds allow the reader to recover the story itself even if he begins to remember other things, a grocery list, for example. A simple clue to how a writer might achieve the reader's attention is enclosed in the reader's forgetfulness. Many writers have noted that their success in storytelling is linked to a character who seems to act on her own, deciding or acting independently of the writer. In truth, this seems philosophically impossible since the writer is writing the story not the main character. However, many writers hold to this irrationality (myself included) noting that characters in their stories act on their own when the stories are working best. One explanation for this notion would be that like a reader who forgets herself while enmeshed in the character's desires and actions, the successful writer also forgets herself when creating this character.
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Thoughts on Spook Country by William Gibson
Thoughts on Pattern Recognition by William GibsonOneTwo Three Four Five Six Seven
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