--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Duveyoung <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > It is soooo easy to say anything, and even mean it deeply, > and yet, it is poetry, a song to one's self, not a > communication.
Just as a riff-on-language on your riff-on-language :-), there *can* be communication in writing as far as I am concerned. It's tough, but it can be done, and inter- estingly enough the "path" to communicating via writing is the same as other spiritual paths -- get beyond the self. > And, when receiving instead of sending, it seems even > easier to read something and make it mean almost anything. One of the things I've been thankful for as a writer is all of the decades when I've made at least part of my living as a tech writer. In that field, you really can't *allow* the reader to make what you write "mean almost anything." If they're to use the piece of software or hardware you're writing about, they really have to get what you really *meant*. So it's a kind of "writing within limits." You can't ramble. You can't free-associate. You can't invent your own colorful language and phrases (well, you can, but they have to be comprehensible as geekspeak). Ya gots to stick to the subject and make it as simple and as "gettable" as humanly possible. There is no room for the ego in a tech writer, at least not in what he or she writes. The late, lamented Kurt Vonnegut paid his dues as a tech writer, too, and raved about it as one of his best learning experiences as a writer. Same with a number of science fiction writers. > So let me see if I can play -- merely play -- with these > words to show how far afield I can get on the slippery > slopes of poetic interpretations. Go for it. As far as I can tell, Fairfield Life has no User's Manual, and I'm not about to write one. Like you, I'm here to play as a *break* from having to worry about egoless communication. :-) > "God knows" -- Which God? -- suddenly no one has the same > definition. How can I use the word at all? Turq sure has > given us all a lot of important challenge on this, right? I really didn't mean to limit its use. I was just expounding (in past posts) on why it's a problematic word for me on forums like this. Everybody's got their own idea of what the word means, but they never seem to *share* their own ideas of what the word means, merely the word. :-) > On the other hand, syntactically, it seems that the phrase > "God knows," is mainly being used as a soft explicative -- > not a religious statement about God. Ambiguity is in > the eye of the beholder. Is it, with this phrase? Yeah, yeah...I *know* how it's used, but think about what the phrase actually *says*. It says that God "knows." Therefore God has sentience, and the ability to "know" things. That's why I tend to use "Go figure" to convey a similar sense of bemused cluelessness. :-) Back to the riff about communication... A former spiritual teacher I studied with had an interesting take on writing. He said that there were three "levels" of writing. The first was like tech writing -- "Just the facts, ma'am." No frills, just communication. The second was with more frills, a lot like the egoic writing you see trying to pass itself off as writing these days. Lots of flowery descriptions of experiences, some of them damned poetic and beautiful. But the one thing they can't convey is the actual experience itself. At level three you can do that -- encapsulate an experience (even an abstract spiritual experience) in words so effectively that a reader can actually be tricked into having that experience as he or she reads it. Suffice it so say this stuff is rare, but it exists. Anyway...gotta go and meet my friends for some tapas. Later. Maybe. God knows. :-)
