Dear Reader,
My name is Ryan Gumlia, I am from Southern California, and I do not know how to balance the aesthetic and the ethical in my writing. Everything else follows, but most significantly: questions in light of a love for [n] ^ writing.
When I refer to the aesthetic and the ethical, I refer to a sorry bastardization of the aesthetic-ethical-religious framework that Kierkegaard lays out in Either/Or, itself a less sorry bastardization of the ethical framework Hegel lays out in Philosophy of Right. Essentially, I understand the aesthetic as the subjective realm of personal pleasure, the ethical as the objective realm of social responsibility, and I apply their distinction as a guiding framework everywhere. For instance, when writing, I take my aesthetic to adore play while the ethical demands clarity. We achieve this clarity by designing and following rules of syntax and semantics. The result is a universal form, as well defined and minimally ambiguous as possible, that, alongside norms of cooperative intent, supplies us with a functional language for law and etc.
Hardly one for pleasure, though! How much more fun that realm of play where joys can sprout from universal cracks, where syntactic transgressions and semantic doubts tease those parts of our brain that love subverted expectation and discovered solution. Too, those odd idiosyncrasies of private histories: read him he that walks by wearing his life on his language sleeve! Text-ur-ed and studd-i-ed with those fragments of l-yore, enjoining us in tHe age old dialectic of battling subjectivities. The mode wherefore each abides by what pleases them, distributing commas for Rhythm’s sake, composing time for that inner Harmony, it whispering, quietly: pause here; all the while the Grammar shouts—STOP THERE!
My main question is how to negotiate the aesthetic and ethical when I write about myself.
It seems to me that writing about oneself is, more than writing about anything else, writing oneself. But to the extent that the self does not come in universal form, this translation cannot be of perfect fidelity. In this tension, I wonder a few things. (1) How should we balance producing effect and transmitting information? (2) Must everything be parsable, or can the cryptic be valuable? (3) Are we our preferences—that is, am I giving too much weight to the aesthetic arbiter within that stakes its life on a break here, confusion there, and mix to boot? (4) Should I subjugate this internal norm to the ethical priority of clarity—or one of universal aesthetics—and to what degree? To concretize some of my concern here, I point to the [n] in the second sentence of this letter. Initially placed as a reminder that I did not want a verb form, it’s a morphological head notation I learned recently: immediately parsable, and thus enriching, for me, but I imagine less for, if not at all, and thus potentially offensive to, you. I leave it as example of the hyperreferential and (yes) alienating mode I list toward of late, a modernish juxtaposition of everything, everywhere, all at once, a—I’ve defended—meticulous and excited treatment of all the atoms of word and life.
I owe this list to my most recent influence. Kierkegaard’s proven determinant on my approach to writing, but Proust and Joyce (in that order) have most stoked it proper. (in that order) because things have changed since DS. In Search of Lost Time terms, I stepped off that storied train, whose continuous track still remembers the classroom in which I read “finger of God,” and in the act relinquished, like the forlorn poets before me who could neither themselves handle narrative’s frustrating hope, the power of helpful image and linear coherence, stealing instead for the slippery discreteness that composes our universe. In Ulysses terms, then “Eumaeus,” now “Sirens.” In my terms, I really have found more utility in Joyce’s infinites. Was Buck Mulligan stately, or did he come stately? In that second sentence above, do I love writing the product, activity, or both? In the same, could [n] operate as a sort of non-non Chrysostomos?
The less charitable explanation for my transformation is that I am insecure, that not only do I obscure void content with decorative form, but that I deliberately contrive it all so as to be immune to audit. This explanation says I approach you as a less earnest Marlow, attempting to account to myself for my experiences, desperate to be understood, but making a falser attempt to communicate than a vain one. I have this anxiety. I sublimate it in an over-intellectualization of the writing act and Kierkegaard. I want to say more, and I want badly for others to take pleasure in how I say it. I write to you also because I want to improve. I want to sharpen this craft that is one of our best ways to share: trivial passions for lattes and freeways or knotted dilemmas re: pre-professional Lukács. And if I come on strong with my questions, I hope I don’t impress that I am interested merely in transaction, in definite answers or clearer conscience. Just as my aesthetic-ethical framework developed in the company of three soulful friends, I hope it may as well dissolve and another be born in the company of yours and others, stretched and prodded by a soirée of approaches. What won’t dissolve, though, is my contribution: I love language at its most granular, and even more, I love learning how you might see that granularity.
Should we meet—should you share, too—you will find me a relentless well of interest in how you write what you mean to say and how you understand what you write to mean what you mean to say—why you decide final forms: your internal harmonies, your comfort with risk, your reverence or irreverence for convention. I admit that this interest can sometimes trade off with one in content writ large (or content in the traditional sense), but I suggest that the interplay between form and content is illuminating—that my desire is, at its least, still a desire to understand you, and at its most, capable of an even more salient understanding. It’s to try for what lives in between the word boundaries, what shapes the morphemes, to beg for a grasp of the function that maps signified to sign and is thus applicable to all. This may be a fool’s errand. My premise that each of us refract in our writing via a unique and externally legible Rosetta Stone could just follow from naive egocentrism. Even if so, I proffer the positive externality of warmth. My tries manifest in close reading, in longform questions in longform responses, and in extraletter association. In friends and better ones. And I hope for the chance to make yours soon.
Sincerely,
Ryan