WRITERLY PRINT

I have to confess that I'm not purely a 'typer', or author who types-up his work without reference to a manuscript, but a writer or, more correctly, scribbler who later types-up what he has scribbled. Generally, I scribble in the morning and type in the afternoon, typing-up the morning's scribble. I pride myself on this arrangement, since it makes for variety and is beneficial to my health, particularly with regard to my eyes and stomach, which would become respectively strained and ulcerated, were I to make a point of typing all day, like some authors. For me, there is too much physicality in the use of a typewriter, even the small portable one I use, so I prefer the usually more relaxing medium of scribble, which I also find more intimate.

I always scribble with a black felt-tipped pen, not only because I like its facile motion across the page but, no less importantly, because it confers a kind of supernatural bias on my scribbling and is appropriate to such scribble. Why, you may wonder, do I scribble and not write, meaning to write clearly and carefully, if not beautifully. The simple answer is that, being a supernaturalist, I prefer truth to beauty, and scribble is the best and most suitable way of conveying the Truth. In other words, it makes no claim to beauty, to belles lettres in a merely technical sense, but enables one to pursue one's ideas at maximum speed, the very speed necessary for the acquirement and development of a high degree of inspiration commensurate with the rapid flow of one's thought. Write carefully, with special attention to the formation of the lettering, and you get bogged down in technicalities, sacrificing truth to beauty, or essence to appearance.

No, I am no 'belle-lettrist', in any sense of that term, but a confirmed scribbler, and have been so for some years now, to the general advantage of the Truth. Those who pursue truth must abandon beauty, and not merely in their style or technique ... but in their lifestyle generally. Hence the absence of women in my life and its consequent freedom from enslavement to the Beautiful. Had I acquired a beautiful woman some years ago, when I almost did, I would never have got to this. I may not even have become a writer in the first place, or, if I had, it would probably have been on a less supernatural level than that to which I'm now accustomed. However, speculation aside, I know for sure that the pursuit of truth requires the abandonment of beauty, and the nearer one gets to the Truth, the more must one abandon the Beautiful, since the formless and the formal are ever antithetical.

You may have perceived, reader, that my work is formless, and this, too, is appropriate to its supernatural status. Instead of proceeding from A to B or M and back to A again, like most authors, I proceed from A-Z, with little or no hint of a recapitulation. You can believe me when I say that it took some time for me to get to this level, to completely abandon my starting-point and wind-up my work with an approximately antithetical culmination. It's as though, having begun in the Father or some diluted equivalent thereof, I must end in the Holy Ghost, maintaining a forward-tending momentum throughout the work's duration. Such work is not literary, my friend, but poetic, and if I was once a philosopher, I have since veered towards the opposite extreme in accordance with my Irish temperament, which fights shy of literary endeavour, that middle-of-the-road creativity more suited to the atomic British. For me, it is philosophy or poetry, not fiction, which, by contrast, I equate, whether in the novel or novella, with a democratic proclivity, in contrast to the autocratic and theocratic essences of the extreme disciplines.

Well, I'm no autocrat, and it is debatable whether my philosophy was ever genuinely autocratic. Certainly, I now consider myself a theocrat, and theocracy means, besides poetry in an anthological context, Social Transcendentalism, or the ideology of the Holy Ghost. I have scant regard for autocratic theocracy or for democratic theocracy, just as I have scant regard for the use of crayons or pencils in writing, the first of which I regard as subnatural on account of their waxy constitution, the second of which I regard as natural on account of their lead constitution. Could it be, I wonder, that, in contrast to pencils, fountain pens conform to an anti-natural constitution by dint of their reliance on ink, which, unlike wax and lead, is an artificial phenomenon? This would imply that, while pencils were right wing, fountain pens are left wing, albeit of a liberal rather than a radical persuasion. For if there is one thing more anti-natural, or artificial, than a fountain pen, it can only be a biro, which contains its own synthetic ink and channels it, through a ball-point tip, more sparingly and pointedly, as a rule, than ever the nib of a fountain pen can do, if indeed 'channel' is the correct word here. At any rate, there is less mess with a biro and, compared to a fountain pen, it is relatively easy and economical to use. It's also more absolute, in that one doesn't refill the slender container but simply throws it away once the ink has run out. This saves a lot of time and inconvenience!

So where does it stand in the evolutionary spectrum - extreme anti-naturalism? Very extreme anti-naturalism? Certainly more anti-natural than the fountain pen, but doubtfully of a truly radical or, if a political analogy be permissible here, communist persuasion. More like a Democratic Socialist vis-à-vis a Liberal distinction, something left wing within a democratic, or atomic, writerly system. After all, one still writes with a biro, even if in a scribbling fashion, and the same, of course, holds true of fountain pens and, though I loathe to admit it, felt-tip pens, which must also fall within a democratic writerly framework, if on a relatively supernatural and, hence, very right-wing basis.

Is there not, however, something beyond the ball-point pen which would correspond, in its extreme anti-naturalism, to a communist equivalent? Doubtless you have all heard of typewriters, and if my logical intuition is anything to rely on, then I think we have hit upon the truly anti-natural, anti-democratic mode of conveying verbal information, which doesn't so much write as print, and thus signifies a 'fall' (forwards) from the joined lettering of natural writing or, for that matter, moderately anti-natural (biro) writing and/or scribbling ... to the disjointed lettering of print. At least, this is generally the case; though there are, I believe, typewriters which can actually write, albeit in a highly orthodox and stereotypical kind of way, and we may accord them a crudely supernatural significance. However, the majority of typewriters, including my own, print, as do young children and as adults used to do in comparatively backward times ... such as the early Middle Ages, when writing was unheard of and only a relatively small number of people even knew how to print, that is to say, to write in a disconnected way. And these were the favoured people, the learned, monied, powerful, and industrious men of a largely subnatural age who, not surprisingly, had access to a subnatural mode of writing, commensurate with the particle side of a proton absolutism, each letter separate and distinct, reflecting this particle apartness - an autocratic norm.

But, of course, man progressed to joined writing, i.e. to writing-proper, in the course of time, and we may see in this development a naturalism commensurate with the wavicle side of a proton-biased atomic relativity, as germane to the Church and, in particular, the Catholic Church, which conforms to an attractive atomic bias ... in contrast to the reactive proton bias of the preceding particle kingdom. Wavicles signify an indivisible unity, and words become wavicle equivalents, on the protonic level, when the lettering of which they are formed is joined together in writerly prose. Obviously, such a procedure must be naturalistic, effected by hand though guided by mind. There is mind, too, in the subnatural mode of writing, e.g. printing, but such as there is would be more concerned with concentrating attention upon appearances, or the style of the lettering, than on essences, or that which was being communicated through it. A lot of evolutionary time must pass before men give the greater part of their attention to content, and as we approach the modern age, an age par excellence of scribbling, we can rest assured that concern with essence over appearance has reached a high-peak, if not in the case of scribblers like myself the peak, confirming the utmost writerly decadence. For writing is, after all, essentially an apparent phenomenon, since it stems from a proton tradition, and whilst appearances have their essences, and hence writing its content, the essence of the proton is ever apparent. Paradoxical and confusing, I know; but incontrovertible nonetheless! Much more concern with content over form, and my writing would become illegible and therefore thoroughly decadent from a naturalistic point of view. Probably it would be illegible to most people now, and even I occasionally have to strain my brain in order to decipher it, assuming my memory is at fault. Fortunately by typing-up in the afternoon what I have scribbled in the morning, I retain in memory most of what I 'wrote', and this greatly facilitates the deciphering of my text. Were I to leave a gap of three or more days between scribbling and typing, the latter would undoubtedly prove a more difficult, if not impossible, task than it does at present!

As a rule, however, my typing is fluent, and this is all the more remarkable in that I am self-taught, not to mention prone to ulceration of the stomach. Yet the typewriter - and I use the term generically - is in some sense a decadent medium of communication, corresponding to the particle side of an electron-biased atomicity, which signifies an evolutionary 'fall' (forwards) from wavicle precedent, as from the Church to the State, and in particular the republican state, with especial reference to people's republics. Certainly the production by the typewriter of disconnected lettering indicates a 'fall' from the joined lettering of naturalistic writing, which is the essence of such writing, whilst also reflecting a progression, with regard to appearances, from the natural to the artificial, as from writing to typing and, in a certain sense, the bound to the free, or the production of independent artificial lettering (characters) which are free, as it were, from the constraints of a proton-biased determinism - just as, in a wider context, republican man is free from the domination of the Church, and never more so than in a communist state. Probably, if ideological inferences or analogies are to be drawn, a manual typewriter corresponds to a Marxist status, whereas an electric typewriter corresponds to a Marxist-Leninist status, as if the addition of electricity conferred a kind of spurious, and hence Leninist, theocracy on the fundamentally anti-democratic, egalitarian nature of the typewriter and, no less importantly, typeface in question. An improvement, no doubt, on the manual machine, but still leaving something to be desired!

And what, from a supernatural viewpoint, is that something if not joined artificial lettering, and thus a return to a wavicle status, albeit one antithetical to the proton-biased wavicles of naturalistic writing. Yes, I am of course alluding to electron wavicles, such as would conform to a radically theocratic status applicable to a supernatural age or society. Now we may believe that if a manual writerly typewriter corresponds to a fascist status, then an electronic or, preferably, battery-run writerly typewriter would correspond, by contrast, to a Social Transcendentalist status - the use of batteries signifying a more theocratic correlation than electricity by dint, one can only suppose, of the absence of wires, leads, plugs, etc. So an artificiality that served a higher, wavicle end, the production of the most supernatural lettering, germane to a free-electron integrity.

Ah, I have to admit that my little manual typewriter is a long way from that! But perhaps this is another reason why I disdain its use on a full-time basis, preferring to scribble in the morning and type-up the result in the afternoon, as if afraid or unwilling to completely part company with naturalism, and hence my Catholic roots, at the risk of becoming unduly or extensively anti-naturalistic and thus Marxist - a not-untypical Irish position, rarely appreciated by the materialistic British! Not once, in all these years of scribbling, have I ever entirely parted company with my scribble and proceeded to type from scratch in an absolutely typing framework. There is nothing of the Shaw or Priestley about me, no left-wing allegiance. If I prefer to scribble than to write, and to use a black felt-tipped pen instead of a pencil, not to mention biro, it's because I identify more with the supernatural than with the natural and choose to push the natural in a supernatural direction, conscious of the ideological limitations imposed upon one by the inherently democratic medium of writing, which necessarily makes for a constricted supernaturalism analogous, in a way, to the supernaturalism endemic to the use of painterly art for transcendental ends, as in Mondrian, Kandinsky, Rothko, Vasarely, and other such 'supernatural' abstractionists. Theirs is a transcendentalism within a democratic, or canvas/painterly, tradition, in contrast to the fascistic transcendentalism, as it were, of the light artist or the Centrist transcendentalism, if you will, of the holographer, that ultimate type of visual artist who is destined, one way or another, to dominate the future. Much as I would like to utilize a writerly typewriter, I have to write with the tools available to me, and I can't say that I particularly mind this, having grown accustomed to the art of pushing a plastic pen, not to say resigned myself to my 'printerly' portable. I am no slave to electron-biased atomic particles and would rather people know that I also scribble, in a decadent proton-biased wavicle style, than suppose me to be solely a typing author, like the great majority of so-called writers, no matter how ignorant they may be of the ideological implications of a typing absolutism. I conform, you might say, to the compromise between church and state of the contemporary Irish republic: though while this is so in technical appearances, in conceptual essences I'm all the time agitating against such a compromise in the name of electron-wavicle absolutism ... as germane to Social Transcendentalism. Such are the paradoxes of which relative lives are made!

Also paradoxical is the distinction between what might be described as the apparent and the essential means of communication, relative to the dichotomy between, say, speech and writing. Clearly, naturalism is not simply a matter of writing (I use the term in its classical bourgeois sense) but also, and more obviously, of speaking, and when we speak to another we talk. As it happens, I talk very rarely, being something of a loner and, hence, supernaturalist. But talking is as important to most people as writing, and those who write - as opposed to scribble - invariably talk. Talk, then, is the more natural of the two modes of communication, and if a Christian dichotomy between Satan and Christ is in order here, then talk corresponds to the Devil and writing to the Son. Yet beneath talk - and perhaps prior to it - there is (or was) what you may call speaking to oneself, a subnatural indulgence germane to a proton-particle absolutism, and above talk - and in a sense subsequent to it - there is (or will be) what you may call speaking to an artificial self, such as a tape-recorder or a cassette-recorder, the former equivalent to a fascist mode of supernatural speech, the latter commensurate, so I believe, with a Centrist mode of supernatural communication, whether intended for industrial, commercial, professional, or relaxational purposes. Such supernaturalism is absolute, a recording of a voice that can be replayed and listened to at a later time, whether by the same person or another. And it must contrast with the anti-naturalism of relative voice recordings and/or transmissions, as in intercoms and telephones, which invariably transform the natural voice as it is broken up into electronic signals and conveyed along wire to the recipient at the other end of the line. If a distinction between anti-natural Marxist and anti-supernatural Marxist-Leninist ideological equivalents is to be made, then the dialling phone probably corresponds to the former and the press-button phone to the latter, although the battery-operated digital phone would approximate to the supernatural, being more transcendentalist, irrespective of the relativistic context of phoning which, increasingly these days, acquires a quasi-absolutist character in conjunction with the use of blank cassettes (for absences) and taped recordings (for messages).

Be that as it may, voice transmissions of whatever kind, including the use of walkie-talkies, correspond to the apparent, superficial side of verbal communication between people. In contrast to the essential, profound side ... of 'literary' communication, the wavicle as opposed to the particle side. And we find such a distinction in most other aspects of human experience, including the sexual, where it takes the form of a coital/oral dichotomy, specifically in bourgeois heterosexual relations ... as germane to an atomic age and society. Elsewhere, in my evolving oeuvre, I have defined the archetypal Social Transcendentalist sexuality as implying a compromise between sex-doll copulation on the apparent, or 'social' side, and mature juvenile pornographic voyeurism on the essential, or 'transcendental' side, this latter, pertaining to computer discs, a late-teenage sublimated oral equivalent intended for the head. Similarly, I could define the archetypal Social Transcendentalist verbal modes of communication as implying a compromise between cassette and/or digital speech on the apparent, particle side and ... electric and/or battery writerly-typing on the essential, wavicle side, with the emphasis, so far as possible, on the latter. Could it be, I wonder, that aural communication is destined to wither and die as supernaturalism evolves, in the course of Centrist time, into supra-naturalism? Yes, I believe so, though this isn't to say there is any guarantee that 'literary' communication will continue throughout the duration of the next civilization either. Probably it, too, is destined to make way for something higher, born from the essential and completely transcending all appearances, even 'literary' ones. The ultimate verbal communication between men, the antithesis of early pagan sign language, a developing telepathy as the utilitarian complement to a developing awareness in beatific spirituality. Now that, after all, is something above all thought, the pure awareness of absolute mind, the wavicle side of the electron, the superconscious at its most refined, a true essence of nonverbal being!

Yes, even superior to telepathy; though we need not seek to underestimate the direct transference of thought from one mind to another. For telepathy is not, to say the least, an everyday occurrence, and few of us can lay claim to such an achievement. Yet is there any reason, on that account, why it should not become a norm of communication in the more advanced future, when appearances, even on the level of writerly typing, should become increasingly taboo? As far as verbal communication is concerned, telepathy would signify a stage beyond such means to one that completely transcends appearances, even on the most refined wavicle level. For if writing is intended to be silently read, to be thought through as if an indirect form of telepathy, then the direct transference of thought would likewise maintain a silence, transcending all recourse to speech. This silence would surely complement the peace of hypermeditation!

Whatever transpires to being the case, I do know that wavicle communication is going to gain in importance in the decades ahead, and at the expense of the particle side of the electron, with particular reference to printerly typing. Already one finds, in various contemporary magazines, the use of an italic print as a stylistic mean for certain pages, and if this is not indicative of a transitional status from disconnected print to connected print, or writing-proper, relative to a quasi-theocratic leaning, then I'm at a loss to explain it! Telepathy may yet have to wait a while, but writerly print is just around the corner.

Now just as joined natural writing is easier to read, when clear, than subnatural printing, making for a quicker transmission of verbal communication, so joined supernatural typing will be easier to read than the current anti-natural printing of the contemporary book, magazine, letter, etc., confirming an upgrading of intellectual activity, commensurate with the Centre, and the consequent return to a wavicle essence - the true antidote to republican print!

Thus speaks Shay Griffin, literary spokesperson for the Social Transcendentalist revolution.