EVOLVING WRITING

Five thousand years ago there were no readers.  That’s because there was no writing.  It hadn’t been invented yet.  Five thousand years is not really enough time for everyone to evolve the skill.  Anyway, no one knows how reading/writing are done in terms of the brain because each person does it in his own way.  The constant seems to be a little patch of the cerebrum originally meant for recognizing the shapes of prey while hunting.  This is not an act of fear, running away from a predator,  this is BEING a predator.  Having enough food depends upon it.  (No wild animal wants to fuck humans, though humans fantasize about it.  Some try it with domestic animals, who rarely mind much, though other humans object to the idea.  It’s a snub, isn’t it?)  The ability to read and write is the child of the hunter/gatherer aeon in the evolution of human beings.

Not everyone can learn to read, maybe because that little patch of neurons is missing or damaged.  Maybe because the person never cared enough to try to read, since it’s not a pressing need for everyone on the planet.  But those who COULD learn to read and write were quick to make an advantage of it.  It was one of the forces that changed humans when they settled in cities to eat and hoard grain, domesticate animals, form named families instead of tribes, and organize religion.  All of which meant building structures for barns, bins, homes and temples.  It all happened under climate change pressure about ten thousand years ago in most places.  One of those structures might have been a library, but maybe the temple doubled since it was already a place for Holy Scrolls.  Because the religious people and the bean-counters were both quick to see the potential power and authority of something written down.  In fact, they sort of blur together.  That’s why we write down our laws and our histories of what “really” happened, so that some troubadour doesn’t come along and change the course of the Trojan War because he thinks Helen of Troy was just another dame.  We might lose track of who owes what to whom.

So writing and reading become “property” and therefore slaves and lesser beings (women, blacks) are prevented by law from learning the skill, but they learn it anyway.  For every person who can’t learn reading/writing, there is another who just naturally sees how it works and then can do it.  Fewer want to do it.  

I can remember watching my mother settle at the dining room table with her stationary and special green fountain pen.  I’d go sit there myself with a crayon, scribbling loops and caps in the same dimensions as hers -- she had big handwriting.  What she was really doing was trying to comfort her own mother who was dying of cancer.  She probably didn’t mail the letters directly to her mother because my grandfather tried to prevent my mother’s marriage and then refused to speak to her. (Very parallel to him refusing to admit the daughter killed in a car crash was actually dead -- trying to force his will on everything, even reality.)  But maybe even he didn’t dare interfere with the mail.   I felt that the emotional aura at that table was daring and potent.  Now that my writing is more intelligible (if I use a keyboard) the aura has not left it.  I don’t give a damn about publication.

My grandfather finally came around and loaned my mother enough money to finish her teaching degree so she could put me through college.  Nothing is as persuasive as economics.  The first year I taught at Browning High School, I wrote a little Christmas skit in which a princess (Kate Grissom) taught a peasant girl (Connie Meinecke) to read, using the big chained-to-the-pulpit Bible in the supposed cathedral.  In those days women were forbidden to read.  Teenagers love forbidden stuff.

Yes, too much sitting at a keyboard will make you fat and give you heart attacks.  Doctors are always badgering to make sitters get up and move around.  Fine.  Good idea.  You do it.  This is my choice.  I’ve waited all my life to sit here and write with the cats snoring alongside and the sun pouring down on the snow-pintoed yard out my window.  The doves that live in my blue spruce are out there rustling something in the grass.  I don’t stop my kind of pecking.  I’m going someplace with this whether or not it’s a book.

They say that thinking of a particular kind makes the brain develop new neurons and allot more space for them.  So now it’s not a little patch of my cerebrum that handles reading and writing -- it’s an expanding amoeba that finally begins to understand some things that have always been mysteries, stuff about rhetoric and structural grammar, but also about weaving stories and images, whether or not they are metaphorical -- just that constant shuttling of words.  It goes on in my sleep, while I walk to the post office, while I sit here.  Always has.  It must be a sort of virus I caught long ago, but a virus is just a section of genetic code and it can be either good or bad or maybe even neutral.  Or lethal or life-giving.

They say that writing is governed to some degree by whom you write for, what that person you imagine reading might think.  It’s true for me.  The person I imagine is not one you might guess.  Of course, that’s part of the point because writing is not always public, not always a form of boasting, but a secret transaction at one’s core.  Many of the writing wives around here write “ranch romances” even though they are happily married and not many of the husbands look like the covers of their books.  They do it for money.  Ranches need money.  (Of course, it’s fun.)

But I jumped in at the deep end, not so much about sex, which is only physical, but about something like identity, a deeper creation.  Why else would I join a man twice my age who cast bronzes?  He didn’t just make sculptures, he melted, poured and shaped bronze and I helped and we were fully aware that this was a pre-historic skill, pre-dating cities and writing, based on the ability to see the figures of living beings in the living world that feeds us.  That’s the way I understand writing.