BEYOND CONVENTIONAL WRITING

Religion in the Western world, particularly after the Enlightenment which gave a high value to science and the confirmable world, has been a matter of institutions as well as their symbolism of buildings, locations, and natural formations.  At first religion was part of government, then was touted as a route to success and happiness.

In fact, what we call religion is a complex of forces, confirmations, instructions,  and aesthetics that give it priority over other ideas and entities, even in a modern individualistic world.  It is a way of binding and defining people as groups.

In our time we value most highly prosperity and morality, and until lately we believed they were related.  In a way, now that we have abandoned morality as getting in the way of prosperity, morality is still primary since it has become a guide of how to cheat successfully, how to be a winning individual in a sucker world.  Strangely, many religions promote powerlessness such as "love" which many translate to mean "be nice," a path to non-power as though helplessness were virtuous.  This appears to be a useful way to disarm individuals who persist in opposing the group, which might be either minority or majority.  To some extent individuals can choose their "group" or congregation, even if it's mostly an aggregation, an accumulation, a gathering of people that might be unconscious, simply a matter of their assumed identities being similar.

Step away from institutional religion, meant for groups, giving individuals a lot to think about and chances for leadership.  Some are protective against a larger society and others oppose it.  In terms of the individual, religion is often not what it is for a group.  "Nones" explicitly reject institutions but may have specific and meaningful moralities.

Writing is a vocation or calling that often might bring up the topic of religion or the individual in relation to the group (whether defined as family, community, identity groups, humankind or living creatures).  Print on paper captures the dynamic process of the individual brain as it pushes against the environment and sorts through it.  Pen on paper is not the only way to preserve a record of something that can't really be recorded.

This is a stiff and sophomoric way to describe what is fluid and ineffable, no matter how much you want to "f" it.  While some are trying to get notice and praise for their writing, believing that it is an invited "spirit" for good boys and girls, others wrestle with the true primordial conceptualizing that is underneath words, only conditionally grammatical, and entirely irrelevant to publishing, prizes, inspiration, or any other way that institutions try to own writing.  It's the dimension that causes some to say that in order to be an effective writer, one must develop one's personhood, the qualities that allow truth.

Every language is a code but may not have code for what can be conceptualized: no words, no grammar, no metaphors that capture some felt experience.  True writers seek to master the code, but are also willing to go outside it for ways to say the unspeakable, even when it's only howling.  This is a boundary that some always seek to find and cross, in hopes of finding the way many have felt but couldn't express.  It is often about the edges that institutions deny and suppress.

Talking this way makes me feel like Kahlil Gibran saying all those gnomic, enigmatic puzzles that can be great insight or just chatter, often quite popular.  Not very far away from sophomoric pontificating but apt enough to seem valid.

Back to the little handful of writers I was "talking" about yesterday:  Doig, Welch, Kipp, Blew, et al.  They're good story tellers with genuine experience and insight.  I appreciate and praise them, but I want to go beyond them.  Guthrie is not quite the example I want.  Maclean comes closer.  Von Tilburg Clark even closer.  These folks have had publishing success, but I don't care anything about publishing.  As it stands, writing is meant to be mediocre because that's where the sales are.  Get too fancy and you'll go broke, so in the name of "editing" -- making proper -- publishers often destroy.  They pull teeth when teeth are the story.

When I came back twenty years ago, I had a vague notion of being a Montana writer.  That meant the prairie as a metaphor, the physical sensations of a wide space taking on meaning.  I explored that while in the ministry and had a little praise for it, but from individuals rather than any institutions.  I pondered and read in the environmental movement, which offered bigger concepts in a space so wide it became global.  I thought and felt myself outside of all institutions, even the ones that employed me.

About ten years ago a new medium, internet messages that operated almost like phone calls, took me outside print-on-paper categories into a far more fluid, international, and cross-morality context.  I was asked to write for a loose affinity-group defined as boys who do sexwork for survival while trying to grow up.  Did I have anything to say about the meaning of their lives?  Soon that question, sort of journalist-media sensation-seeking, was abandoned.  The point was not to question, but to listen -- not to my experience but to theirs; not on the prairie but anywhere, though I stayed here.

They wanted to know why they suffered (when they did, which was not always), why God was punishing them by putting them in grim life-endangering circumstances like diseases that targeted them or social stigma that caged them.  I saw that they loved movement (skateboards) and risk (city parcoursing).  They lived in that below-language underconscious human adventure and they often howled.  Their families had betrayed them -- the families that had ever existed beyond biology.  What accident had allowed them to persist as individuals even if they had no larger group at all?  Many died.  Others grew up.  Their highest value was each other, their most eloquent word the embrace.

It's clear that a writer who is serious must learn to survive -- not just express -- knowing things of great pain and moral degradation, often the realization of one's own limitations and failings, small contemptible things.  There are two effective keys and I learned them from the boys themselves:  story and laughter.  I'll keep at the keyboard.