Living Wisdom

Establishing shot pans over a dimly lit, tiny bedroom. An oil lamp flickers on a crate; a rumpled mass of blankets incompletely swathes arms, legs, buttocks.

A slow groan. Suddenly, the blanket erupts and j(A)de leaps to hir feet.

j(A)de: I can't do it! I can't! I won't! Fuck!

Velvet: (rubbing sleep from her eyes) Oh honey, what's wrong?

j(A)de: (fiercely) I want to say things, say important and beautiful things, to say them loudly and to many people, so they can be touched by a power to act they otherwise can't seem to find.

Velvet: I know, I know, and I love you for it. (blows a kiss)

j(A)de: (pacing furiously) But I'm infected, damn it. Infected by every essay I've read, every article, every book. They're all echoing in my mind ... "Speak the truth! Find your voice!" And I sit down and start a powerful sentence, a paragraph arguing clearly and well ... and fuck!

Velvet: What?

j(A)de: (low, troubled) That's just not the way the world really is, see? Not the world that exists, and not the world I want. I start saying something and suddenly I'm aware of its flaws, or I think of someone else's perspective that casts what I say in a different light. It all depends who I'm writing to, what's most relevant and important, the best way to phrase things. But what am I to do about it? If I start highlighting all my doubts, my caveats, my variations, I strip my words of power and passion. If I try to acknowledge every different viewpoint, every alternate angle, the whole thing gets horribly bogged down.

Silence. Rain has started pattering in the background. A crow caws.

Velvet: (pensive) I see what you're saying. It's a deeper challenge than simply avoiding a dominant masculinist style of bravado and bluster, isn't it? It's rooted in the very idea of what it means to write.

j(A)de: Yeah. Writing a text means becoming the Author of a perspective, a point of view, a position. It means staking a claim on the nature of reality -- and that claim is a stake through the heart of living wisdom.

Velvet: I love you, j(A)de, and your provocations! But why is talking so different from writing? You love talking...

j(A)de: It isn't fixed. You can say one thing to one person, and another thing to someone else. You can say one thing at one moment, and something else later.

Velvet: Some people pride themselves on their consistency...

?j(A)de: Foolishness! Look, words and ideas aren't reality: relationships are.

Velvet: Staking a claim indeed!

j(A)de: (sly smile) Oh fuck you, this is important. (earnestly) When we talk with each other, our words enact our relationships -- with each other as individuals, with social groups and identities of all kinds, with the "world" as we experience it.

Velvet: Writing can do that too, surely.

j(A)de: Yeah, but it's all the wrong kinds of relationships! It's an "Author" sitting somewhere alone, writing to some dumbed-down abstracted "Audience" as if there's one set of words that can speak truly to them all. The broader the audience it actually works for, the lower the common denominator. How can that be enough for anyone in this complex, damnably hard world?

Velvet: What about niche writing?

j(A)de: Yeah, you can be much more powerful and evocative, sure. But it's hard to get excited about writing for the "choir". Maybe that sounds arrogant, but ... you know, I loved my zine days and maybe that's all that's really possible in the world, but it's hard to feel so marginalized all the time.

?Velvet: That's not the only problem with it, either. Most of the writing I've seen that is self-consciously writing to a well-defined audience exacerbates that definition: it patrols and reinforces the boundaries of one group or faction or culture. That's what gives it explanatory power, that's what makes it appealing to its readers -- and in so doing, the differences between various communities and ways of being (cough I mean, writing) are highlighted.

j(A)de: And there's basically no incentive for anyone to write in a way that makes it easier for groups to understand each other, to hear each other, to collaborate.

(Stillness. The rain is dripping from the trees. Velvet looks curiously at the door.)

Velvet: (loudly) Hello? Who's there?

(A pause. Velvet smiles.)

Jax: (opens the door) Oh! Hello!

Velvet: (looking at j(A)de) Does he normally eavesdrop on you?

(Everyone looks at each other.)

Jax: Look, I couldn't help overhearing, and we can talk about all this in a minute, but I'm bursting to ask a question. You're all going on and on about the dismal failures of writing. But what about fiction?

Velvet: What about it?

Jax: A good work of fiction isn't a polemic, isn't a one-sided argument to a narrow audience, but a nuanced speaking of the truly complex reality of life through a complex web of three-dimensional characters. The novel is powerful for precisely this reason -- and it can speak to all kinds of people, all kinds of ways.

j(A)de: Oh, come off your literary hobby horse. Novels are normally either snobbish or silly, and often both.

Jax: Not always.

?Velvet: Not always. It's an interesting point... (aside, to j(A)de) And anyway, don't aggravate him: isn't he cute when he's earnest?

Jax: Velvet...!

Velvet: So let me pose a challenge to us, this fine morning.

(The sun shines through the clouds; the color balance transforms in moments.)

Velvet: What could it look like, feel like, to write in a fundamentally different way?

j(A)de: Goddess, I'd love to!

Jax: Well, couldn't you just write a really good novel ...

Velvet: The Great American?

j(A)de: The problem is, no one person has enough experience to speak well the many voices of the world we are, let alone what we need to become. Especially because writing really well takes a lot of time and energy -- and usually that sucks people away from the actual hurly burly of life.

Jax: Well, you could write collectively, like Wu Ming...

Velvet: That's a good step. But the world we want is even bigger than that. The world we want is a world of many worlds. This means that we need each of those worlds to understand itself as benefiting from the ecology of relationships with other movements, organizations, cultures. And we need to grow the practical daily intellectual work that helps them understand how they already are -- and can better be -- related, collaborative, coherent.

j(A)de: You know I love your rhetoric, Velv, but it's a strange thing to talk about a world, or an organization, or whatnot, "understanding" itself.

Jax: You mean the implicit reification of the group-form, denying individual difference and autonomy, the hybridity of identity and the necessary potentiality of change?

j(A)de: Sometimes you're weird, Jax.

Velvet: You're right, both of you. Language is hard, for this kind of thing! I suppose that's why theorists develop all kinds of jargon. But the point is to find a way of writing that helps people create the healthy ecology of change that can replace the Empire.

j(A)de: By modeling it.

Jax: In other words, the process and form of the becoming-representation itself embodies the relational character of intellectuality, of myth-making.

j(A)de: In particular, between people with radically different attitudes -- like me and you, snotnose.

Jax: (hurt) But I thought... I thought you liked me.

j(A)de: Hey, I do like you, and I especially like fucking you, and I even agree with some of your more intelligible pronouncements, but you can be seriously high-falutin'.

Velvet: (eyebrow cocked) You're lovers? Ah...

Jax: (apologetically towards Velvet) Look Velv, it all kind of came on suddenly...

Velvet: Hey, I think it's sweet. (slow smile) It's a bit surprising, is all. A bit hopeful, too. Especially considering all this.

(Quiet. Birds are singing. The light is turning golden as the sun shines directly through the curtains.)

j(A)de: I still don't know what "all this" would look like in practice.

Velvet: Hey, look. What if a bunch of people wrote a lot of interconnecting "fanfics" -- except the shared "world" they elaborate is the world we inhabit, the "real" world, and the only canon they work off is their own?

j(A)de: You mean, not constrained to Harry Potter or Star Wars or the like? Not depending on the fictional universe of any "professional" writer?

?Velvet: Yeah, but more than that I mean: us. What if it was about us, and our friends, and the other people in our world that we know, or don't know. Yet.

Jax: Our desires, our visions, our struggles, our words and deeds and the fabric of the world we might always already be becoming?

j(A)de: That's a lot to try and hold as a writer.

Jax: Ah, the sublime craft!

Velvet: But remember, it's not one person.

j(A)de: Yeah, so it's going to be really uneven, all these different texts jostling for attention... all these different styles, good ideas mixed up with bad. Just like the fanfic universe; why would anyone bother with it?

Jax: What if everyone edits everyone else, rather just making more and more? That is, the good stuff is honed, the mundane stuff refined, the bad stuff sloughed off.

Velvet: That's a fascinating idea! It might even be technically possible, using the web.

j(A)de: Oooh, I'm getting tingly. (The others look at hir.) Seriously... This is exciting. Maybe I will be able to give full throat to the demiurge roaring inside me, after all!

Tableau. The lamp gutters, as a breeze blows the curtains. Camera pans to the window, zooms out of focus into the dancing light.