What good is reading? #1

Nothing dictates my reading, but a searching, a searching for a text, a stumbling through texts, half-awake or half brain-dead, drunk or drugged, an oaf or troll bursting subtle eloquent walls of thought, missing obvious puns, not connecting the larger implications to our world today. Feeling no less hopeless after I've read than before I've begun. My reading solves no problems. Well.

What is the problem I'm to be solving? The world has problems, certainly. Some: poverty, inequality, capitalism, overworked/underworked, the oppression of representation, black people killed in the streets not being enough to direct any positive changes for black people not yet killed in the streets, children sold into sex slavery, war in iraq, afghanistan, pakistan, yemen, ukraine, and I'm not sure where exactly in africa. Fucking climate change. The fact that we as a culture will not do anything to prevent a three foot rise in sea-levels. My reading won't change that. Reading isn't an equipment suited to the challenge of these problems. Reading avant-garde poetry, critical theory, novels, ancient epic, etc., none of it is any way to stop the morbid tractor trailer from delivering its end-days cargo post haste. If I can't give it up, does that make me as cruel and selfish as the freeway full of Hummer-drivers? Does it damn me to the Koch brother circle of hell? This is a question of ethics--what ought I do in the face of evil--I can't answer. Worse, though reading could maybe help me answer it, I still don't have an answer even though I read for much of the day.

At some point, it seems to me, the private life of reading I've been grumpily living for all this time becomes as damning to me, if not directly damning to the planet and its many civilizations--indirectly, one straw only. Other strikes against me are the other straws I couldn't encourage off the camel's back with me when I jumped. I understand if this comes across as latent evangelism--not of a religious faith, but of an environmental morality. I am not wholly comfortable with that idea; I'd much rather have my own epiphany, run my own life, and leave others to destroy themselves. If there's one piece of clarity I have thanks to writing, it is the knowledge of our interconnectedness. Without disturbing others it is impossible to live one's life. That is, unless we can change the behavior of others, there is no hope for our planet and no hope for us.

Reading--though maybe I need to add some non-fiction to the mix--offers a transmission of information. If I did add non-fiction to the mix, it is likely I would know something--facts--about the imminent destruction waiting at the end of our brightly burning, shorter and shorter fuse. I could use those facts in turn to write my own response, to blast out my own synthesis and make my own case and argument. But who would hear my argument? Readers.

What if readers are powerless to fix the problem? If readers are powerless, then writing has no efficacy whatsoever. The black man calls the police, but they don't show up. The black man calls the police and calls the police and calls the police, but no one shows up. Calling the police is not an efficacious solution for the black man, and, writing for readers is no way to save the world, not even for a writer. At least, it won't work the way I always thought it would.

I think of books with direct effect--Uncle Tom's Cabin, at least given the stories I know about it, fits this bill though I think it might be the only one. Woodward and Bernstein busting open Watergate is another example of how this should work, or used to work. American's aren't stimulated any longer by novels, not to action or anything by fleeting pathos. Journalism might as well be shelved alongside the fiction--it has none of the immediate impact it once did. The audience and spectators of the 21st century are de-sensitized to the slow read, blind to the movements of that internal stage, cannot sustain a complete sentence long enough to connect it to real action. This is proven by the fact that our system continues on its happy doomsday avalanche inspite of excellent journalism being conducted at tremendous personal expense--both in terms of the journalist's own cash and his or her life. It seems that the very power of narrative has been so completely co-opted by the status quo that the dozens of stories written and filmed of the fallaciousness of the American blunder in the middle east (not to mention our environmental policy, and on and on) cannot for even a minute contend with the idealogical nightmare of something like American Sniper. Narrative is only worthwhile to the bulk of American civilization when it enshrines the party line. Subversive narrative is written only for the reader of such narratives; Writing for readers will not save the world.

What then, do we give up writing?

Of course not. Change the way we write? Change where we write. Change who we write to--if not for, exactly.

Is narrative dead? Narrative, in its full nuance can never die. It is fundamental to the human character--or, at least, to the linguistic patterns in which it is engendered. This fundamental nature is in fact what allows the narrative to fracture and shatter and spread, to remain open, incomplete and unfinished, allows the world into the narrative.

 Push and express and share and subvert. This requires not just the writing of works, but the dissemination of these same works (readings, printing, digital realm, friendship). May I return to this topic of dissemination soon.