If a Tree Falls in the Woods

The fact that you are reading this is counter to the idea of this blog. This blog is counter to the idea of this website. This website was designed and is maintained specifically for the purpose of allowing Q to reach a wider audience. Its purpose is to be seen, to be shared, to inspire, and to create community. She conceived of and made it expressly to do these things. So, what’s the deal with this place? Hidden beyond the employees-only door behind the counter and squirreled away behind the boxes of books in this digital repository is a small room where you now sit, browsing texts intentionally hidden from you under strict instructions not to allow anyone else to do so. In this sea of community and concelebration (not a typo, just google it) is an island of exclusion—a book that resents a reader.

You ask, if this place is meant to exclude, why do I post here? I would encourage you instead to ask: if this place is meant to exclude, why were you able to find it? Why was it even made? But I’ll answer the question you asked. When I began to clear space for my little corner of the internet the question was posed to me, “Well what happens if no one ever finds it? Wouldn’t that make you sad?” A question to which I had a simple answer “Nope”.

When a writer tells someone they’re a writer, some form of the same two inevitable questions follows: “What kind of stuff do you write?” and “Are you published?” Both are exceedingly reasonable. Finding out what type of literature a writer writes gives you an immediate glimpse of what they find interesting. A writer of high-fantasy fiction likely has a different set of interests from one who writes near-future science realism. Furthermore, the point of writing is to get published and share your writing with the world, right? Otherwise, we would be robbed of the enrichment that comes with great works like Dante’s Comedìa, or Señor Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien Años De Solidad. Such is the way with all great art. The loss of the Sistine Chapel would be a tragedy beyond measure, but its never having existed would be an even greater blow to humanity. After all, its destruction would not (and indeed could not) retroactively remove all the works of art that it inspired. It is better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.

Now that I have proved its reasonability, I will take umbrage with the second question. I firmly believe, setting aside conventions on politeness, the answer to “Have you been published?” should be “Who cares?” I am a writer, and I have no real desire to be published. This should come as no surprise to you, as in order to read anything I write you had to find this hidden place, likely by accident. This may seem like a paradox, but it’s not. I simply do not believe that the point of writing is to be published. While publishing a work is the best way to transmit its merits to a wider audience, it does not give rise to the merits themselves. Nor does, I would say, the author. The work generates its own merits.

Have you ever found yourself unable to adequately express a vague feeling so, between fumbling attempts, you explain that “I know what I want to say, I just don’t know how to say it”. It is my distinct pleasure to inform you that you, in fact, did not know what you wanted to say. Language is integral to the human brain. I don’t mean simply to say that it’s very important (as is the most common modern usage of the word integral), rather I mean it in the strict sense. Language is essential to have a fully formed brain. There is an entire section of the brain (Wernicke’s Area) fully dedicated to the learning and use of language. Not of sounds, not of gibberish, specifically language. Verbs, adverbs, nouns, participles, subjects, all that stuff we learned in school, is a requirement for a fully formed brain.

Next, we only ever say things with words. One can express a simple mental state with non-language verbal expressions (such as hissing in pain or wailing in agony) or even communicate deep complexities with totally nonverbal signals (such as kissing a loved one or crying at a funeral) but in order to say something, words are a fundamental requirement. You might think to yourself, “What if someone walks by me and I nod at them, and they nod back? Haven’t we just said hello?” No, you haven’t. What you have done is greeted or acknowledged one another. While this may produce the same effect as saying hello, you did not in fact say hello. Now you say, “But I’ve effectively said hello! Why the pedantry?” Well, if you stop interrupting me, I’ll tell you.

It goes back to the example of trying to find what you want to say. If you don’t know how to, using language, verbally express a thought you are having, you are not having a rational (or conscious) thought. Your brain (which requires language) is instead taking an irrational (or unconscious) thought and attempting to rationalize it into a linguistic expression of your subjective experience. Put simply, language is the pinnacle of rational thought. It would be better, then, to say, “I have a vague and irrational feeling, and I’m currently trying to translate it from a concept to a rational and communicable idea”. But then whoever you were speaking to would assume you’re insane, or worse, an academic.

Therefore, if in order to have rational thought, you must first have and develop language; it stands to reason that the more you develop and strengthen language, the greater the capacity for rational thinking. It is this bolstering of the capacity for rational thought, not publication, that I view as the primary purpose of writing.

Writing is an exercise for the rational mind. It is the rigorous training of a logical creature. The more of your own rational ideas you write down, the more your brain becomes proficient at the grasping of external ideas. The more your brain is able to grasp external ideas, the more it can translate them into language and thus into rational thought. This cycle loops infinitely into itself and, in the diligent and willing subject, becomes a source of infinite improvement. Writing, like speaking, forces your brain to organize and rationalize all the nameless vague impressions of ideas we carry around every hour of every day. The key difference between how writing and speaking does this is in the number of participants. If you are speaking, namely doing so to explain internal ideas, you are speaking to another person. In that scenario, their expressed rational ideas can affect how you rationalize your internal irrational ideas. This is, naturally, not a bad thing. Indeed, that peer-to-peer modification is the basis of teaching. However, when you sit and write, you rationalize your own irrationality in a vacuum, such that the thoughts and opinions you form are authentically your own. They are original to you whether or not someone has thought them before you. This originality can be thought of as a type of cognitive homoplasy.

There, we find the point of this secret room. Why do I post here? Because this place allows my irrational mind to train and instruct my rational mind. This entire blog is a pretense to force my rationality to work through the great backlog of irrational thought that accumulates in day-to-day life. If the intrinsic purpose of writing was to share that which is written, then the very existence of such a hidden page would be a contradiction unresolvable to the human mind. But it is not. The intrinsic purpose of writing is to improve the writer.

The analytics tell me that some of you have indeed found this place. This is an inevitable effect, and yet entirely secondary to this place’s purpose. You are, of course, welcome to stay so long as you are willing to keep this place a closely guarded secret. You may even leave comments if you so wish. I am, after all, not opposed to the idea of community. What’s important, though, is that you understand the lesson this place serves to teach by its very existence. The ultimate goal of a written work is not to be read, rather is is simply to have been written.