What You Had Inside Has Affected Your Outside

from Faith and Theology

blogging as a reading-together

Here’s one more brief excerpt from my paper on blogging – this is from a section entitled “Blogging as a Technology of the Self.”

Blogging is not only a new technology of writing; it’s also a new way of reading. In Christian antiquity, reading was a social activity, not a wholly private one. The earliest recorded incident of silent reading is found in Augustine’s Confessions Augustine relates with astonishment Ambrose’s habit of reading in silence, a practice he had never seen before: “When he read, his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still.”

Centuries later, reading as an oral and auditory social practice still remained the norm. Medieval writers “assumed that their readers would hear rather than simply see the text,” and their texts “repeatedly call upon the audience to ‘lend ears’ to a tale.” Only in the tenth century did reading practices start to become typically silent and solitary; by the modern period, the internalised nature of reading has become entirely self-evident. So that a literary critic like Harold Bloom can now simply define reading as the love of solitude; while George Steiner can argue that the busy sociality of modern life is destroying authentic reading, since “serious reading excludes even one’s intimates.”

In the world of Web 2.0, the ideal of the solitary reader is waning fast. Blogging is a kind of reading-together. It is the formation of a new kind of community of reading. No longer is reading an activity reserved for the private study, that carefully crafted space where thought is cultivated under conditions of silence, leisure, economic privilege. To read a blog is to participate in a collective reading process: on any given day, we all read the same post, the same thread of comments and responses. Such reading is far removed from solitude: the reading is understood primarily as a stimulus to conversation, criticism, discussion. Here, reading is not so much an end in itself as the means to a particular form of community. The very act of reading thus becomes a collective project.

Although I don’t share George Steiner’s cultural pessimism or his investment in the Victorian ideal of leisurely private reading, I think he showed remarkable insight when, as early as 1972, he noted the decline of solitary reading. Young people today, he observed, “read against a musical background or in company. Almost instinctively, they resent the solipsism … implicit in the classic act of reading. They wish to shut no one out from the empathic tide of their consciousness.” All this in 1972: one almost feels as though he was prophesying the existence of blogs!

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Enlightenment is man's leaving his self-caused immaturity. Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another. Such immaturity is self-caused if its cause is not lack of intelligence, but by lack of determination and courage to use one's intelligence without being guided by another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore:

Sapere aude!

Have courage to use your own intelligence!


— Immanuel Kant, in “What Is Enlightenment?”, 1784

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The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion, all in one.
John Ruskin

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"We have to learn to read and write ourselves out of ourselves, and uncurl ourselves back into the world. Language is not a tool for communication that belongs to us. Language is not an exclusively human ability at all. It is a field of meanings and intentions that we inhabit. Human language grows out of the world itself. We speak because the world speaks. And because language and the symbols upon which it depends are the Breath of God, it has the power to penetrate to the very heart of things. Language in the broadest sense is creative because the world was spoken into being. Because of this, reading can be a means of transformation, of gnosis. The reading of the world that we need to learn has to be active and engaged. It must take the form of a dialogue that begins with a careful listening to the voices that speak to us from beyond the bounds of the known. We have to engage in a gentle kind of call and response, a reading that calls in turn for speech, and perhaps for writing, or other kinds of making, and that always turns back to listening."
- David Abram
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"I am struck by how difficult it is to get back to something we knew to be true once we have been converted, forced by circumstances, or simply denied and turned away from it, to whatever lonely mess we have managed to make since. It is as though the experience of unhappiness is more valid than that of joy. We all know the experience of wanting something badly, only to have it disappear as we approach it. Rarely do we look at the wanting self. My shadowless shadow. We don't cope with much grace, neither the grace of civility, nor the grace of physical being, nor the grace of the spirit. There is at bottom no real distinction between them anyway. Perhaps I am too often absent from my own being."
- Terrance Keenan
St. Nadie in Winter

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A poet went to see a doctor. He said to him, "I have all kinds of terrible symptoms. I am unhappy and uncomfortable, my hair and my arms and legs are as if tortured. "The doctor replied, "Is it not true that you have not yet given out your latest poetic composition?" "That is true," said the poet. "Very well," said the physician, "be good enough to recite. "He did so, and, at the doctor's orders, said his lines again and again.Then the doctor said, "Stand up, for you are now cured. What you had inside had affected your outside. Now that it is released, you are well again."

—A Sufi Fable

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