Why write?
Writing as crystallized thought, a way of expressing the labyrinth of interconnected, messy, and many time incoherent ideas in my mind. It is a form of knowledge distillation.
It is a form of lossiness as mutation, a way to re-interpret and adapt the thoughts into a new form – to breathe it new life. Whether networked or linear, molding it into new forms through language and terminology can give it a new perspective. A mental unflattening.
It is the form almost universally understood by all, a sort of contact language that enables people from vastly different backgrounds and contexts to build shared fictions.
It is the contribution of the radical intellectual, a sort of gift and offering. From David Graeber, ‘Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology’:
One obvious role for a radical intellectual is to do precisely that: to look at those who are creating viable alternatives, try to figure out what might be the larger implications of what they are (already) doing, and then offer those ideas back, not as prescriptions, but as contributions, possibilities — as gifts […] Such a project would have to have two aspects: one ethnographic, one utopian, suspended in a constant dialogue.
# Art
Writing as art
I write like the 12 dollar desk salad, the bar that packs 20 grams of protein and plastic into one 200-calorie brick. But good writing, like a good meal, needs fat. It should indulge readers, is meant to be chewed and enjoyed, affording a generous escape from the prosaic and mundane. – Jasmine Sun
How much time should we spend producing great writing, and how much trying to prove it to the world? Can we write as if we were Hanya Yanagihara in “A Little Life”? To please only ourselves?