Podcast: A letter to Mum
In which Vanessa and I go to church. The gay-friendly Metropolitan Community Church, to be precise. We then visit the pastor a few days later to pick his brains. This blog entry is written as a letter to my mum, who is a kind of Catholic activist. It’s one of the only entries in the blog which is deliberately crafted to be for someone specific. This type of writing, I recently discovered, is described as epistolary.
Today on the phone with Vanessa, we were discussing the act of reading. I’m sure I’ve mentioned already that my decision to podcast these blog entries is not so much about making them accessible to the blind, or so you can listen to them while washing up or on the train. (Although, I am interested in this outcome, and would love to hear what scenarios you’re in, when you do listen to them).
Rather, podcasting forces me to read aloud, which in turn forces me to read each and every word I have written - to mouth, to enounce, to pronounce, every word. To read as an overtly bodily activity, involving the generation of sound-energy, the intake of breath, etc etc. So I’m interested in anything out there that folks have written about the practice of reading, per se.
Thus, I’ve been gobbling up this great little book “On Reading” by Proust, lent to me by Lisa. It doesn’t really deal with this physicality of reading, as I am describing above, but more about the relationship between the writer and reader. Rather than being a “conversation”, Proust considers writing for readers as an “incitement”.
My favourite bit so far:
The supreme effort of the writer as of the artist ends in raising only partially for us the veil of ugliness and insignificance that leaves us incurious before the universe. Then he [the writer/artist] says to us: ‘Look, look,
Scented with clover and artemesia
Holding fast their quick, narrow streams
The regions of the Aisne and the Oise‘Look at the house in Zeeland, pink and shiny as a seashell. Look! Learn to see!’ At which moment he vanishes. Such is the price of reading and also its inadequacy. To make it into a discipline is to give to large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can show us the way into it; it does not constitute it. (p32)
What do I like about this idea of Proust? The idea that writing for a reader is a kind of incitement? First of all, the writer doesn’t have to do everything for you. The “veil of insignificance” needs only to be partially raised on the universe - the rest is up to the reader.
Writing is an act of unveiling, a material demonstration (not just a concept) that reveals something about the universe of the writer, and this can serve to incite the reader to do the same - to find the world fascinating and new.
Thinking about the blog, I wonder about Proust’s idea of incitement. I think about the facility that the blog enables: the ability to channel your “incitement” immediately into a sort of response (corresponding thru comments), to become an “inciter” yourself. Surely this begins to approximate conversation again…
More on Proust later.
In the meantime, this posting about “going to church on Sunday” contains some provocative stuff. A bit like the jelly wrestling episodes, the church visit is presented as a sort of pseudo-ethnographic study of the performances of folks who belong to exotic cultures. Each contains description, wondering, and analysis of the rituals and actions of a group of individuals who constitute a small community, of sorts.
And each leads to wider wonderings about ethical issues. In the case of the jelly wrestling, things to do with the ethics of consent. And at church, ruminations on the nature of one’s relationship to god, given that those who attend the Metropolitan Community Church have a “lifestyle” not officially condoned by Christianity. What to do when the church which was set up to “invite sinners to dinners” ends up casting ‘em out?
Listen to the story here [mp3, 14min, 7mb].
Read the original posting here.