DE BEAUVOIR: Just how can one tell what are the words whose association will act on the reader? Must one trust in the void? Take the plunge?
SARTRE: Yes, you chance it. After all, you have reasons for chancing it.
So, my reasons for taking chances with writing are related to two important lessons about human behaviour presented to me by one of my teachers at uni.
The first lesson is that politics is in everything, not only between nations but between two people, between two grasshoppers, between a can of tomatoes and a raw tomato. My can of Italian tomatoes flavoured with oregano travelled a long way, packed in and taped up aboard a boat. My can of tomatoes undoubtedly cost more economically and environmentally than my tomato I grew in my backyard. Tada: politics.
The other lesson is that conflict is notoriously present when interesting people get together to do something productive.
So long as I can find interesting ideas and characters, no matter if they are incomprehensibly unrelated, pushing them together in writing creates conflict, power struggles, a jarring dynamic, politics. It's the process of making a crude reflection of human behaviour, so that readers recognise humanity in the words and are, as Simone says "acted on" by literature.
My efforts in writing have been lax recently. Some time, brain willing, I will explode again.
SARTRE: Yes, you chance it. After all, you have reasons for chancing it.
So, my reasons for taking chances with writing are related to two important lessons about human behaviour presented to me by one of my teachers at uni.
The first lesson is that politics is in everything, not only between nations but between two people, between two grasshoppers, between a can of tomatoes and a raw tomato. My can of Italian tomatoes flavoured with oregano travelled a long way, packed in and taped up aboard a boat. My can of tomatoes undoubtedly cost more economically and environmentally than my tomato I grew in my backyard. Tada: politics.
The other lesson is that conflict is notoriously present when interesting people get together to do something productive.
So long as I can find interesting ideas and characters, no matter if they are incomprehensibly unrelated, pushing them together in writing creates conflict, power struggles, a jarring dynamic, politics. It's the process of making a crude reflection of human behaviour, so that readers recognise humanity in the words and are, as Simone says "acted on" by literature.
My efforts in writing have been lax recently. Some time, brain willing, I will explode again.
assuming that tomato wasnt first imported in seed form from italy in which case the political relationship would be strained by the missinformation.
ReplyDeleteThen we would be further embroiled in the juicy and beguiling secrets of the plump Italian progeny... misinformation is another one of those delicious phenomenon, I'm so curious about what we don't know, and why we haven't had the chance to know it.
ReplyDelete