Why Write At All?

One may ask oneself: “Why write at all?” One possible, general answer that tells the truth about writing is: I write to get real.

What we call our world is only our human reality: we have no other. Without language, we would be unable to make sense of our world: our reality, our experience of living, would have no meaning, because our thoughts and feelings would have no medium. Without language, we would have no memory, no history, no culture, no civilization.

We have no ready access to the other person’s sense or consciousness of his world, his reality, except through what he says or writes. We have no access at all to other creature’s sense or consciousness of their environment, their world: we can only imagine it. Our consciousness is our own individual psyche, our inner self or spirit: mind and heart. (The English word psyche is Greek psychē, meaning “breath, principle of life, life, soul.”)

Language is our mind’s imagination’s finest invention: language and imagination are one. Words are abstract, concepts: we need to imagine what words express. The word evokes an image; the image lights up its meaning. To think well is to imagine well: mind and imagination are one. “Concepts without intuition are blind; intuitions with-out concept are empty,” says Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason).

We are our words, and all our words speak true. “A rose is a rose is a rose,” says the poet Gertrude Stein. If then a word’s nature is truth-saying, our own nature as human is truth-seeking. Only the liar ab-uses, wastes, language, deceives himself (and others, as well) and debases, corrupts his own nature. (The word “human” is from Latin humus, meaning “earth,” and Latin humilis, “humble, lowly.” The latest-evolved humanoid or human being is called Homo sapiens: Latin sapiens mean “wise.” This is to say that we believe (in faith) that as humanity evolves, we would have a deeper sense or consciousness of what is real, what is true, what is right, what is just. That word consciousness is akin to the word conscience: both come from Latin scire, “to know,” which also gives us the English word, “science.”

All our words (all languages) converse, play with one another, intermarry: which is why we have translation, from Latin transferre, translatus: “to carry or ferry across.” When we translate from one language to another, we ferry or carry across the void of meaninglessness between the two languages a meaningfulness which both languages are shaping/speaking. All our words cry out for more light.

We never cease to wonder and inquire. When we have no more questions, the quest for what is real, what is true, stalls or ceases.

Any text or word- weave is a bearer of meaning (Tagalog, saysay, “significance”); but at times, what has been wrought or shaped from words and words has an ineffable depth of meaningfulness (Tagalog, diwa, “spirit, soul”) which bears the writer’s intuition or insight. That insight or inscape of the writer’s subject or theme (paksa) is a luminance of thought no idea or concept expresses, a radiancy of feeing no thought apprehends.

Whatever one writes, is not so much written in as shaped or wrought from a given language. The text or word-weave is constituted by language and imagination working in concert. The imagination makes real to the mind what the mind abstracts from our consciousness or sense of what is real, what is true, what is right, what is just. So there, in the text or word-weave, through all the words’ interplay, one’s subject or theme, one’s own mind’s import or heart’s burden, is shaped and comes alive. The reader of the text need only at times to be skeptical (from Greek, skeptikos, “thoughtful”; skeptesthai, “to look, con- sider”): the text’s reader need only reflect, introspect, dis-cern; he need only listen quietly to his own spirit, where the word is our way, our truth, and our life. Thus, as one reads and interprets, one is also read: one’s own con-sciousness comes alight.

The writer as artist is a shaper of language. Over time, he discovers his own way with language, his style, which Albert Camus defines as “the simultaneous existence of reality and the mind that gives that reality its form.”

He works the language, as the farmer tills the soil to bear his crop: he finds his own path through the lexical wilder-ness of a given historical language and makes his own clearing there. The ground of language which he shapes is a people’s culture through their history. Himself shaped by a given language from birth and by other languages in his education, one is spoken for, but one may also, in his own time, as he matures and evolves, speak back and clarify, even modify, a given outlook or understanding. Any language then (Tagalog, English, etc. as it has evolved), given an adequate mastery of it, can shape one’s sense of country. Our literature then, wrought from (rather than written in) whatever language is our people’s memory. A country is only as strong as her people’s memory: Imagination’s heartland. One’s country (like nation, an abs-traction) is what one’s imagination owes allegiance to.

Gémino H. Abad

May 21/Sept. 15, 19, 2022