Thought - 2/9/2002

"I dunno whether I'm writing to you or if I'm talking to myself" is a line worth pursuing. A letter casually written can turn out to have the most profound of thoughts. I find this repeatedly. Everyone that is involved in this act of writing and using language wonders I guess, at some stage of the direction and intent of the word, the sentence, the line, the paragraph, the page, the thought. Direction and intent must be the most elusive of things. For if we don't think of language in direct propulsive lines, but as point of intersection as in a web of meaning(s) then indeed, do we write to "you" or to "ourselves"? And who is that "you" we write to? Is it a fictionalised counterpart of the self that we want to create in order that we have at least an audience of one? Or is it a stable mental conception of an other outside the self?

"I dunno whether I'm writing to you or if I'm talking to myself" was probably written, dashed off in a moment - but I'm ringing from its echo after effects. Not only the depth of the suggestion that directionality in writing is suspect, there is that "writing" vs "talking". Is the self so immediate that we talk to ourselves but not dare externalise introspection enough to write to ourselves? We write FOR ourselves, not TO ourselves. Is writing so deliberate and too permanent that perhaps writing to the self is a contradiction, for the thought would have already been communicated more immediately, and that would instead resemble a speech act?

"I dunno whether I'm writing to you or if I'm talking to myself" Perhaps we do both at the same time - in that every act of writing towards is a recitation inwards of what lies in our heads. The articulation of thought happens simultaneously and we "talk" to ourselves in an assurance that the authorial "I" exists while we "write" towards a you, to construct a milleu (fabricated or reflected?) in which to place the "I". Does this then generate a tremendous circularity that can only be clarified by concretising the whole process in a product ie the written word?

"I dunno whether I'm writing to you or if I'm talking to myself" but do we conform to an image of the external first - an intended audience - before allowing our thought (the I) to mingle with it? Perhaps. The syntactical order of the line - you before I - suggests this.

Maybe I'm talking to myself and re-writing you.