• About

Machina Memorialis

~ A commonplace blog

Machina Memorialis

Category Archives: Presentations

CCCC 2013 Presentation: Becoming Acquainted with the Silent Underground

29 Friday Mar 2013

Posted by John in Presentations, Rhetoric and Composition, Silence, Writing

≈ 2 Comments

Here’s the text to my CCCC 2013 presentation “Becoming Acquainted with the Silent Underground: Academics and Severe Writing Difficulties,” which I presented as part of Session N.29: The Silence Project: Giving Voice to Academics with Severe Writing Difficulties. The talk begins and then has scattered throughout passages from free writing and process writing I’ve done as I’ve been working through my own writing difficulties, and the included images come from slides I displayed during the presentation. I’ve posted my handout as a public Google Doc. I also revised and distributed the collage essay on struggling with writing I posted a few days before the session. That post has been revised to reflect what I handed out at CCCC.

“Becoming Acquainted with the Silent Underground: Academics and Severe Writing Difficulties”

CCCC 2013 | Session N.29 | 16 March 2013

I: Epigraph: Focused Free Write

“I’ve been spending a good deal of time thinking about silence these days. About becoming silent and being silent. Not silent because I want to be silent or even silence as protest, but a pathological silence. Silence I couldn’t escape from if I wanted to. That kind of silence. I struggled against that silence. I wasn’t able to do what I wanted. I was pushed into a corner. I had to fight. No, not really. I didn’t fight. I let it overtake me. Not that I saw myself has having any options at the time. Emotionally, psychologically, I’m not sure that I did. The silence was a symptom of something much greater, a deep and difficult depression, and I couldn’t address the silence until I had addressed the depression, until I got through that.” (Focused Freewrite, March 24, 2012)

II: Introduction

I’d like to welcome you all to our session on academics with severe writing difficulties. Each of us up here today has struggled, or is struggling deeply, with writing. While struggling with writing is normal, as Mike Rose reminds us in the Preface to When a Writer Can’t Write (ix), the struggles we’re talking about here today are far more difficult. They are what I’ve come to call severe writing difficulties, the kinds of difficulties that “when given free reign,” to quote psychologist Robert Boice, “[…] can become pathological” (Professors as Writers, 1).

As our first speaker, I have three goals for this talk, the first two of which I will address now, and the third of which I will address at the end of our session. First, I am going introduce the subject of academics with severe writing difficulties and the silence that surrounds it. Second, I’m going to introduce what we’ve come to call the Silence Project with its goal of seeking to help other academics struggling with writing break their own silence and to break the silence with which we treat the issue. Finally, as a coda to all our presentations, I will draw upon existing scholarship and our own personal experiences, to offer a set of suggestions for helping others who are struggling deeply with writing and for helping to keep others from having their own writing difficulties become pathological.

III: Anxiety

anxietyMy talk, as with all the talks here today, draws heavily upon my own personal experience. The reason for this is two-fold. First, as Lynn Bloom found in her case studies that led to her article “Anxious Writers in Context: Graduate School and Beyond,” writing anxiety is context-specific and cannot be addressed separate from that context. Second, in his decades of treating academics with writing difficulties, Robert Boice found that one of the best ways to start treatment is to diagnose the particular writing problems the individual is struggling with and then to share with them experiential accounts written by others suffering from those same problems (Professors as Writers 21). This is important, he explains, because it allows struggling writers to realize that they are not alone, that their problems are not unique, and that they are instead, “understandable, manageable problems” (21-22).

IV: “Illiteracy”

Quotes from Peter ElbowIn his essay “Illiteracy at Oxford and Harvard,” Peter Elbow gives an account of the severe writing difficulties that led him to drop out of graduate school. What is significant about this essay is not that Elbow’s ongoing struggles with writing eventually left him with the inability to write and the need to drop out of graduate school, but that he chose to make his story public.

In Professors as Writers: A Self-Help Guide to Productive Writing, psychologist Robert Boice explains that while severe writing difficulties are not uncommon among academics, they are rarely openly discussed (1). In fact, he notes, in the more than two decades he spent treating academics for writing issues, he found that most were more comfortable discussing sexual dysfunction than their struggles with writing (1). This double silence, the silence that comes with severe writing difficulties and the silence about being silent, leads those struggling with writing to struggle alone, unaware that their struggles are not unique. This silence also means that mentors and colleagues of academic writers struggling with severe writing difficulties are both unaware of and unable to distinguish between more common forms of writers’ block that can be readily addressed through traditional means and more severe, even pathological, writing difficulties that often require more serious intervention.

The goal of this panel and of the Silence Project is to help break the silence that surrounds this issue by sharing our own struggles with writing and to use our own experiences to offer insights for others. Our varied stories illustrate some of the reasons writers become blocked and illustrate that blocking may have nothing to do with specific writing tasks, anxieties, or work habits.

V: “Nothing says it better than a whole page of fuck”

A whole page of fuckBoice, as I’ve already noted, argues that when left unaddressed for too long, writing difficulties can become, to use his term again, “pathological” (1). Let me give you a sense of that by reading from one of my freewriting sessions, dated September 22, 2011:

“Okay, so I’m pathetic and I hate myself. Glad to get that out of the way. I can’t write, either. I am pretty much a failure. Depression wins. I lose. I suck. I guess acknowledging this is a good thing isn’t it? I repeat stuff because I don’t know what else to write. I have too much to write but I can’t write and I have no desire to write it now that I’m sitting here because I suck. That’s simply the way it is. Failure. Go failure I’m just typing because I’m to type for ten minutes no matter what and I hate this as almost as much as I hate myself. Failure is an option. I’ve failed. Oh hell. I’ve been at this for not even five minutes yet this is painful and I hate myself and the fact I acan’t write […]. I have a blog post I never published but almost did it was nothing but eight thousand fucks because I wanted ot say fuck. A page full of fuck. […]. I wish I had more than that to offer but that’s about all I can do because I’m a failure.”1  (Freewrite, September 22, 2011)

VI: Just Write

A picture of scraps of notesFar too often well meaning people who sincerely wished to help me, to nudge me along, gave me the standard advice. You know, stuff about how we all find writing difficult from time-to-time, that you just need to sit down and force yourself to do it, to put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard, that the problem is time management or procrastination, that all you need to do is commit to writing one page a day, that everyone can write one page a day. Stuff like that. And, really, all of this is good advice for your run-of-the-mill writing difficulties. It can be, however, devastating for someone whose writing difficulties have become pathological.2 You, with your serious writing difficulties, are unable to resolve your difficulties by doing what everyone knows are the ways one goes about resolving writing difficulties.

So, more than a year after my therapist decided I no longer needed to see him on a regular basis, almost a year after my doctors decided I could go off my antidepressants, four months after I left my tenure-track position at Creighton University,3 a position I held for three years even though my dissertation was not finished, I followed the one model I had: Peter Elbow’s. He’d learned to write himself back into writing, so surely I could too.

VII: On Being Silenced

Drafting notesWhat I produced was horrible, terrible, dark screeds against my self. Dark outpourings of self-loathing and hatred and despair. You see, it’s not just about sitting down and putting pen to paper or fingers to the keyboard. You need to be ready to write. When writing difficulties have become pathological, you need to resolve the underlying issues first. What I learned during the fall and winter of 2011-2012 is that one needs to be ready to do the work of writing—if the issue has its origins outside writing itself or if the writing issues have become pathological enough, you can’t just freewrite yourself into fluency. Such sessions, none of which lasted more than 10 minutes, usually put me into a full-scale depression spiral that could last for days, and it would take me a week or more to work up the courage to try again and start the process over.

VIII: Even the Silent Speak from Time to Time

Image of process writing notesI should tell you that it wasn’t always bad. I had the occasional good writing day. Between September 2011 and February 2012, I can recall three. Two were autobiographical pieces exploring the interrelationship between personal memory and social memory and dealt specifically with the need to integrate into my own life ghosts of a past that was not mine. You see, when I left Creighton, I moved to Washington, DC to marry Lisa Schamess. We’d been friends for six years and had realized that we had fallen in love. The ghost was Lisa’s first husband, a man who had died of cancer in January 2000, a few days before their daughter turned 13 months old. Lisa is working on a memoir of that year between Mona’s birth and Gil’s death, and our friendship and our relationship are built upon talking about ideas and teaching and writing, and her in-laws had become her parents by the time I’d met her, and so I needed to work through that past, and for whatever reason, I could write about that experience.

My other good day of writing was December 15, 2011. Despite the anxiety and fear and stress, I forced myself to write about why I still want to study the rhetoric and poetics of memory. I forced myself to keep writing in an attempt to articulate, succinctly, what it was I want to do. It wasn’t easy and I recall sitting in a Starbucks crying as I wrote, tears dropping on the pages as I kept asking myself “why memory?” and writing responses, and for whatever reason, even though it was hard, I was able to do it that day when on other days I was not. Knowing what I’d done was important, I tried to capture the moment with some process writing:

“That was difficult. I still feel—felt as I wrote—that I am standing outside wherever it is that I think. That I’ve been locked out of my own mind and I can only skim the surface, only see things in large, indistinct shapes and colors but no detail or focus. I kept asking myself the same damn question and kept bashing at it to no end until finally an idea emerged. Nothing new, really. An old idea, but maybe expressed just well enough to use again.” (Process writing, December 15, 2011)

IX: Relearning to Write

Image from this blogOver the past year, I’ve been relearning to write. From the outside, it could seem that my “small victories” came from short periods of freewriting.4 And yes, I did start doing that at the end of February 2012. By May 2012, I was well on my way to reaching 100 consecutive days of writing at least 750 words a day on 750words.com. I would have too, except an illness in the family threw off my schedule, some days I was writing just after midnight and some days just before. That lasted for a week or so and then, 15 minutes into what would have been the 99th day, I realized I’d missed the 98th. The writing helped me gain fluency. I can’t deny that. But those short freewrites where I wrote anything worked because I’d been given the space and time and supportive environment to do so.

Lisa had made it clear that I only had to write if I wanted to. She was writing, and we both had the assumption that I would at some point write again, but the assumption was there because I wanted to return to it. Whether or not I finished my dissertation, whether or not I returned to academia, whether or not I ever tried to write again was my choice.

This was not always the case. My depression, which eventually left me suicidal in the Fall 2008, was the result of an 18-year relationship that was not supportive. We started dating my first year of college, and I made accommodations for her depression. I’d grown up with a bi-polar mother and thought I understood it. Simply put, I subsumed myself in the relationship, and as my depression grew, it manifested itself in writing difficulties. Eventually, my struggle with writing became a second locus of depression. In retrospect, this is not surprising. There was no interest in my work and early on in graduate school, I started hiding the fact I was working on papers because I’d be yelled at if I spent more than two days working on the same seminar paper. I could go on, but I won’t other than to say that by the time I entered therapy in October 2008, I was passive and silent in most aspects of my life.

On July 31, 2008, less than two months after we’d moved to Omaha and just a few weeks before I started my new job at Creighton, she told me she wanted a divorce. She’d been threatening to leave me on and off for more than 10 years by that point, the result of her depression and anger deflected on to me, and I had so subsumed myself in the relationship that there was nothing I feared more. My three years at Creighton were hard, and largely a blur.

By Spring 2010, I was doing well enough that I was able to cobble together a presentation and attend CCCC. And once I was there people wanted to know why I still wasn’t finished with the dissertation, where I had been (I’d been missing CCCC and Computers and Writing), and how I was doing. So I started whispering my story to those who needed to know or those to whom I owed apologies. And as I told my story, a few told me theirs, and I started telling my story more openly and more frequently, and more people told me theirs, grateful to learn that they were not alone, that someone understood what they had gone through or were going through. They—we—are the Academic Underground, the writers who can’t write and have felt unable to talk about our inability to write. And that needs to end.


Coda: Some Recommendations

There are some things we, as compositionists, can do to help those who are struggling with severe writing difficulties and to help circumvent writing difficulties from becoming pathological.

  1. First, we can talk about severe writing difficulties openly. Discuss them as problems not of moral weakness or a sign of inability but of “problems of excessive self-consciousness” (Boice, Procrastination and Blocking xx). Discuss them as resolvable, treatable problems that can affect any of us under the right conditions. This should be part of graduate student and new faculty orientation and repeated often. The single most effective thing we can do is demystify severe struggles with writing and remove the fear and shame and isolation that they can bring.
  2. Make sure your library has copies of key texts on dealing with severe writing difficulties such as Boice’s Professors as Writers and How Writers Journey to Comfort and Fluency. Consider having a few copies floating around in your department. Even better, start off discussions about writing difficulties by using the first few chapters of Boice’s Professors as Writers, “Why Professors Don’t Write” and “The Phenomenology of Writing Problems,” and/or the Introduction to Boice’s How Writers Journey to Comfort and Fluency so that those who find themselves struggling with writing will already be familiar with those texts.
  3. If you are at an institution that requires publication for tenure and promotion or has graduate students, advocate the hiring of a specialist in writing difficulties for your counseling and/or professional development services, someone who can work one-on-one and with groups.
  4. If you mentor, train, or supervise graduate students and faculty, know how to intervene gently and effectively, and when you suspect someone may be struggling with severe writing difficulties, do intervene. Clearly, intervention will be context specific (the situation itself, the person struggling, the people intervening). Intervention is easier if you’ve already created a culture in which severe writing difficulties are discussed openly, but you can even point to our session and Boice’s books as a starting place. They key to intervention is to let person know that they are not unique and that there are ways to overcome the difficulties. Putting them in touch with others who are struggling or have struggled can be psychologically helpful, and being able to offer someone the first few chapters of Boice’s Professors as Writers is also a good move as they can reinforce the understanding that severe writing difficulties aren’t unique or career ending, and they offer those struggling a way forward.
  5. Seek to put accommodations into place for people struggling with severe writing difficulties. As a graduate student, my options were to slog through or take a year of leave in which I would have no official connection with the university. A year of leave meant being cut off from the community and from the library. The one thing I could do effectively was research. Being cut off from that would have been psychologically devastating.

Works Cited

Bloom, Lynn Z. “Anxious Writers in Context: Graduate School and Beyond.” When a Writer Can’t Write: Studies in Writers’ Block and Other Composing-Process Problems. Ed. Mike Rose. New York: The Guilford Press, 1985. 119-133.

Boice, Robert. Procrastination and Blocking: A Novel, Practical Approach. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996.

—. Professors as Writers. A Self-help Guide to Productive Writing. Stillwater, OK: New Forum Press, 1990.

Elbow, Peter. Embracing Contraries: Explorations in Teaching and Learning. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.

—. “Illiteracy at Oxford and Harvard.” Everyone Can Write: Essays Toward a Hopeful Theory of Writing and Teaching Writing. New York: Oxford UP, 2000. 5-27.

Rose, Mike. Preface. When a Writer Can’t Write: Studies in Writers’ Block and Other Composing-Process Problems. Ed. Mike Rose. New York: The Guilford Press, 1985. ix-xiii.

  1. Sometime that day I did go ahead and turn the whole page of fuck post from a draft to a live post. [↩]
  2. If you, reading this, did say such things to me, please do not take this as an attack. We don’t know how to talk about these problems or how to address them. The point of this presentation is to help us learn how to be more effective in our efforts to help others. [↩]
  3. I am particularly grateful to Creighton and to my Department Chair Bob Whipple and colleague and friend Gina Merys who worked so hard to make the time and space for me to resolve my difficulties. In the end my own struggles and depression had gone untreated for so long that I needed more time than was possible [↩]
  4. So meta, yes? Blogging about my own blog. [↩]

Struggles with Writing: A Collage

14 Thursday Mar 2013

Posted by John in Presentations, Rhetoric and Composition, Silence, Writing

≈ 2 Comments

[Edited 29 March 2013 to reflect the version I distributed during our session.] Some snippets pulled together from CCCC 2013 presentation notes and outtakes in the form of a collage essay.

Struggles with Writing: A Collage 

What does it mean to be silenced? What I do know is that I feel like I can’t write. Sometimes I feel as if my brain just won’t work. It’s thick, sludgy, unmoving. Other times I can talk through an idea or process an idea away from any place where I can record it, but once it’s being recorded, whether it’s me typing or writing longhand, me talking to a digital recorder, or me dictating for someone else to write down, all ideas just slip away and I am left with blank emptiness. At worst, the very attempt to write drives me into a full-scale panic attack. I feel intense, overwhelming vertigo. If I persist, I begin crying. What ever happens, if I try to persist, even simply engaging in process writing or free writing, doubt and self-loathing kick in and it can set me off on a depression spiral that will last for days. Because of this, I fear writing. I shy away from it. (Freewrite, March 1, 2012)

***

Notes on writing anxiety, from Lynn Bloom’s “Anxious Writers in Context: Graduate School and Beyond”:

“‘Writing anxiety,’ as I use the term, is a label for one or a combination of feelings, beliefs, or behaviors that interfere with a person’s ability to start, work on, or finish a given writing task that he or she is intellectually capable of doing.” (Bloom 121)

“[Writing anxiety’s] significance or intensity may be powerful enough to overwhelm the writer’s whole life, especially if finishing a dissertation or writing articles or books is crucial to the writer’s career.” (121)

“Since writing anxiety often appears as context-specific, it is clear that the particular context must intrinsically be part of the guiding conceptual framework we use to define, study, and resolve writing anxiety.” (121)

***

What was the problem? I started writing and everything was stupid, convoluted, disjointed, and simply wrong. I kept writing myself into dead ends. What I’d wanted to say, what I had said earlier in the day was gone. Simply vanished from my mind. While I was able to talk it through both to myself and then to Lisa, the very act of trying to write a simple, short thing emptied my mind leaving me with little to say and no ability to say it decently. I kept trying to revise it. Trying to get the words right. To make sense. To get somewhere. I’d hit a wall and turn to something else for a bit to let myself calm down and try again. I spent about 90 minutes at it, finally so frustrated that I had to give up. Regardless of what Lisa says, I failed. I was unable to write what I needed to write. (Freewrite, March 2, 2012)

***

I got to thinking today that if it wasn’t for Peter Elbow’s “Illiteracy at Oxford and Harvard,” the account of how he had to drop out of grad school because he stopped being able to write and how that led to his shift into composition, and for Lisa telling me about the silence that came with Gil’s death a year after Mona was born (she’d finished a novel but didn’t get it accepted for publication until after he died), I’m pretty sure I’d have given up hope. I don’t know if I’ll ever finish the dissertation, but their stories tell me it can be done. (Email explaining my ideas for our CCCC panel to the other presenters, May 5, 2012)

***

Mike Rose argues that while all writing can be marked by struggle as part of the process, “by pauses, false starts, gnawing feelings of inadequacy, crumpled paper,” some writers with some writing tasks find themselves struggling far more. (ix) When this happens, he notes, “[t]houghts won’t come, and when they do they evanesce as the writer tries to work them into written language. Pauses become longer and longer and transmogrify into avoidances. Inner conflicts manifest themselves in jumbled syntax and unclear diction. The demands of one’s life and the ways one has been taught to deal with them interfere again and again with writing” (ix). It’s not always an easy task, he notes, to tell the difference between the “necessary, productive dead end from the intractable composing-process problem” (ix).

***

While I maintain that I am often silenced, it is a curious thing. I can’t write, but I can. I write emails. Long Facebook posts. Sometimes even blog posts, although a look at my blog will show large periods of inactivity. When I tell people that I can’t write, that I’ve been silenced, they counter that I can indeed write and write well. They point to the writing that I am doing. And yes, I am writing. But I’m also silenced. I can’t write what I want to write—high stakes writing from scholarship to a resume all set off my anxieties which drive me to silence. And that’s the point. Boice notes that writing problems, left untreated, can become pathological, and that’s what has happened to me. And that’s why I want to do the Silence Project, as Lisa and I have started calling it.

***

Lisa notes that I’m “actually writing, producing good work, and getting through.” Only she didn’t see the shit I wrote last night. All she’s basing that statement off of is one day of good writing nine fucking day ago. Nine fucking days ago. So, yay me, I wrote 2,800 words of good stuff nine days ago. Stuff I did not need to write. Sure, I’ll probably use it at some point, assuming I can actually build off of it—there’s the possibility I won’t because that’s how it all works: nothing kills the ability to write something more quickly than the decision to intentionally write about it—but that’s neither here nor there right now because what I need to do is finish this application so that I can go to THATCamp. And I need to get it in sooner rather than later so that I get my application in before the event is booked up. No idea if I will, though. I guess Lisa and Mona can go without me.

***

And here’s the thing. I’m now scared to try to finish it. I’ve already had the fucking thing throw me into a bad mood. Right now, more than 12 hours later, I feel hollow and numb. Empty, accept maybe for some rage at myself for being such a fucking failure. I’m scared that trying to finish the thing will set me off even worse. A full on panic attack. A depression spiral. God knows what else. I don’t need that either. (Freewrite, March 2, 2012)

We tend to think of silence as a problem, and extreme silence a pathology, and much of my talk focuses on that. On understanding the existence of pathological silence. Lisa’s starting to get me to also see silence as a positive thing. Silence can represent a time of organizing, thinking through, learning, restructuring, reframing, and even of healing.

Even emerging from pathological silence—silence imposed through depression/trauma/grief, the healing process itself—may be marked/dominated by more silence.

All too often, the impulse for those fighting pathological silence and those urging them on/supporting them, is to fight against that silence. And that is necessary. There needs to be the time when one emerges from silence and the lack of confidence that came with the pathological silence can be hard to overcome.

And yet, as one heals one may need to accept silence not as the enemy but as part of the healing process. As part of the preparation of regaining one’s ability to write. A contradiction, I know, but if Peter Elbow has taught us anything about teaching and mentoring writing, it is the need to embrace the contradictions.

Therefore, we need to figure out how to recognize when pathological silence becomes healing silence and learn how to accept pathological silence as a silence to accept but overcome and healing silence as a silence to accept and embrace. (Musings, January 14, 2013)

***

It was Peter Elbow’s story and Lisa’s story that got me thinking that the silence project might be of use. As Lisa explains in regards to her memoir about the year between Mona’s birth and Gil’s death and the aftermath of young widowhood, it’s a book she’d like to have be able to read when she was going through it to know that she was not alone. (A feeling, Boice notes, that is quite common to academics struggling to write.) I need hope. I need possible insight. Not so much a guide as to how Person X or Person Y made it out, or even assurance that I will make it out—accounts of those who give up should be included—but understanding, identification to use the Burkean term. Know that there are ways out. Know that there might be hope or, conversely, that it’s time to give in and give up. (Freewrite, March 1, 2012)

***

Works Cited

Bloom, Lynn Z. “Anxious Writers in Context: Graduate School and Beyond.” When a Writer Can’t Write: Studies in Writers’ Block and Other Composing-Process Problems. Ed. Mike Rose. New York: The Guilford Press, 1985. 119-133.

Boice, Robert. Professors as Writers. A Self-help Guide to Productive Writing. Stillwater, OK: New Forum Press, 1990.

Elbow, Peter. Embracing Contraries: Explorations in Teaching and Learning. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.

—. “Illiteracy at Oxford and Harvard.” Everyone Can Write: Essays Toward a Hopeful Theory of Writing and Teaching Writing. New York: Oxford UP, 2000. 5-27.

Rose, Mike. Preface. When a Writer Can’t Write: Studies in Writers’ Block and Other Composing-Process Problems. Ed. Mike Rose. New York: The Guilford Press, 1985. ix-xiii.

A CCCC Presentation Outtake: Some Thoughts on Silence

11 Monday Mar 2013

Posted by John in Conferences, Presentations, Rhetoric and Composition, Silence, Writing

≈ Leave a Comment

When I opened my notebook to arrange all my clippings into a coherent talk for CCCC 2013, Lisa asked me to pause so that she could take a picture. She tweeted it with the comment, “this is what an unblocked John Walter looks like.”

Finishing up my presentation for CCCC this Saturday, I’m wading through material that isn’t going to make it into my talk. Taken all together, the session planning emails, research notes, musings, talks with Lisa, and reflections on silence as I freewrote last spring are far more usable and are far more material than I expected. Even a lot of the raw freewriting is asking to be turned into a collage essay—a genre I learned from Peter Elbow’s work and which I regularly assign in writing classes.1

Much of this writing, even the session planning emails, is deeply rooted in the personal, and while the focus of my own part of the session is on the issue of academics with severe writing difficulties and how we as mentors and friends and supervisors can be productively supportive, I will get intensely personal, too. As I’m looking at all this material, especially the freewriting and process writing I did last year as I was struggling to write again, I’m wondering what should and should not be shared. I’m going bold in the presentation, so I might as well not shy away from things here, so here’s an unedited passage from a freewriting session I did on March 24, 2012:

I’ve been spending a good deal of time thinking about silence these days. About becoming silent and being silent. Not silent because I want to be or even silence as protest but a pathological silence. Silence I couldn’t escape from if I wanted to That kind of silence. A silence I couldn’t escape from. I struggled against that silence. I wasn’t able to do what I wanted. I was pushed into a corner. I had to fight. No, not really. I didn’t fight. I let it overtake me. Not that I saw myself has having any options at the time. Emotionally, psychologically, I’m not sure that I did. The silence was a sympton of something much greater, a deep and difficult depression, and I couldn’t address the silence until I had addressed the depression, unitl I got through that. I have gotten through that and now I seem to be writing these days. Writing something. Writing somehow. And that’s good. I like that. I’m writing and it’s good. The silence was a difficult thing to deal with.

Just do it, I’d get told. Or it finally comes down to you and the pen. You and doing the writing. You getting it down. Just write. One page a day. Everyone can write one page a day. Yes, I did that. Or tried to do that. What I produced was horrible, terrible, dark screeds against my self. Dark outpourings of self-loathing and hatred and despair. Painful stuff to look at now, but I have looked at it. I seem to have saved some of it. Some piece of it. And that is good. Not because I like it but because I have it to share in all its raw and terrible and nasty and dark ahd hateful nature. Hopelessness. I have that and I can point to it and I can say that it’s not just about doing it. It’s not just about sitting down and putting pen to paper or fingers to the keyboard. You need to be ready to write. When writing difficulties have become pathological, you need to resolve the underlying issues first. You need to get yourself into the proper state of mind first. Get yourself emotionally healthy again. If you don’t, no amount of freewriting is going to save you. Or, maybe I should say that no amount of freewriting was going to save me. It was but one more venue to bash myself into obilivion. Another weapon to turn upon myself. At times I tried to do the writing without beating myself up but the only thing that would come, the only kind of writing I could sustain in that vein was to attack myself. And it was not good. Not good at all. It wasn’t helpful. That kind of self-loathing would tear me down and remind me that I was once again failing at something so central to who I wanted to be and the life I wanted to live and there’s nothing good about that.

I almost titled my CCCC talk “Freewriting Couldn’t Save Me.” Freewriting couldn’t save me a year after my psychologist had decided I no longer needed treatment for the depression that developed out of my failed marriage, a depression that first manifested itself in an increasing inability to write. I’m reminded here of Lynn Bloom’s two case studies in “Anxious Writers in Context: Gradaute School and Beyond,” published in Mike Rose’s edited collection When a Writer Can’t Write: Studies in Writers’ Block and Other Composing-Process Problems. About Ellen, the graduate student unlikely to finish her degree, Bloom writes, “To resolve Ellen’s writing problems would require a marriage therapist in addition to a writing specialist, to focus on their family context as the source of some of the difficulties (131). As Juliette Ludeker, one of my co-presenters this Saturday, put it in the title of her talk, there are situations “When Being Able to Write Has Nothing to Do with the Ability to Write.”

  1. The more I think about a collage essay representing/exploring the silence of pathological writing difficulties, the more I’m intrigued. It would make an interesting companion to Dasiy Levy’s collage essay “On Silence” in the eighth issue of Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion and Peter Elbow’s own “Silence: A Collage,” first published in Brand and Graves’ Presence of Mind: Writing and the Domain Beyond the Cognitive and reprinted in his Everyone Can Write: Essays Toward a Hopeful Theory of Writing and Teaching Writing. [↩]

CCCC Presentation: Secondary Orality and Digital Mobocracy: A Response

23 Friday Mar 2012

Posted by John in Media Ecology, Presentations, Rhetoric and Composition, Walter Ong

≈ 2 Comments

For CCCC this year, I was asked to serve as a respondent for the session Secondary Orality and Digital Mobocracy (D.25, Thursday, March 22, 3:15-4:30 pm)

As respondent, my role was to “provide brief a perspective on the work of Walter Ong especially as Ong’s work pertains to the issues covered by the above speakers. The respondent will also address the above speakers’ different interpretations of Ong’s work and connect their interpretations to the larger concern of Ong’s continued relevance to composition and rhetoric studies.” Presented here is a longer version of my prepared comments. It ends abruptly so that I could end the talk by addressing the individual papers and their relationship to Ong’s work.

Session Title: Secondary Orality and Digital Mobocracy

RESPONSE

Introduction: Quote and Anecdote

I want to begin with both a quote and an anecdote. First, the quote from Fr. Ong’s 1970 article “Comment: Voice, Print, and Culture”:

Speech is essentially a spoken and heard phenomenon, a matter of voice and ear, an event in the world of sound. Words are sounds. Written words are substitutes for sound and are only marks on a surface until they are converted to sound again, either in the imagination or by actual vocalization.

We know this, but we find it almost impossible to grasp its full implications. The spoken word has become entangled with writing and print. When we talk about words, we are seldom sure whether we mean spoken words or written words or printed words or all of these simultaneously. (87)

And now the anecdote: During the first year I was in the Ph.D. program at Saint Louis University, one of our professors, Dr. Casaregola, had taken me and another graduate student to talk with Fr. Ong. At the time I was trying to work out the problem of what to call the oral-like characteristics of written online communication. I knew that some people were applying the term secondary orality to the phenomena and that others had started using the term tertiary orality. The problem with either term, my fellow graduate student had pointed out to me, was that written online communication isn’t oral; it’s written. I raised the issue with Fr. Ong and asked if maybe secondary literacy might be a better term. Before he had a chance to respond, I added, “I just don’t know what to make of all this.” He said something about having put some thought to the issue and then replied, “I don’t know what to make of it either.”

And that, I think, is a central question raised by these presentations today: What do we make of all this? When we talk about words, are we talking about spoken words, written words, printed words, or all of them simultaneously? On the surface this question may seem simple. After all, oral communication is auditory and written and printed communication is visual. But, if it were that simple, why was I struggling with these questions. And why were so many others? And why, in fact, did Fr. Ong himself reply, “I don’t know what to make of it either”?

Peter Elbow, in the beginning of first chapter of his newest book, Vernacular Eloquence: What Speech Can Bring to Writing, discusses specifically the difficulties in disentangling speech from writing and then spends the chapter trying to do so. In summarizing, he notes that while the differences between speech and writing are clear when we consider them as physical processes, as physical media, and as sensory modalities, the distinction is not so clear when we think about them as language or as products (19). The distinction between speech and writing as language and speech and writing as products become slippery, he notes, “because it depends so much upon social and cultural forces rather than the physical realm” (19). And that’s a key issue to remember here: when we talk about issues of orality and literacy, we are sometimes talking about physical processes, sometimes talking about physical media, sometimes talking about sensory modalities, sometimes talking about language, sometimes talking about products, and sometimes talking about many or all of them simultaneously. As Peter Elbow explains, “much of the confusion about speaking and writing [or, I would add, orality and literacy] comes from not noticing how these words operate in multiple realms or dimensions” (13). When working with these terms, we need to be precise, both for ourselves and for others.

With that said, I want to make a few comments to help us better understand Fr. Ong’s work in orality-literacy contrasts, better understand how that work has been and continues to be relevant to the study composition and rhetoric, and how better to understand the presentations in this session.

Definition of Orality-Literacy Contrasts

First, it might be of use to define what we mean when we talk about orality and literacy within the context of Fr. Ong’s work. In a 1996 interview in Composition Forum, Fr. Ong defines orality-literacy contrasts as “the understanding of the relationships between verbal as well as other types of human expression and the total evolution of the cosmos that we human beings are part of and are still learning more and more about daily” (Kleine and Gale, 83). Fr. Ong described what he did as associative, as trying to describe how various elements of human communication interrelate with consciousness, with culture, with technology, and with the cosmos at large. Understood in this light, the boundaries between the study orality-literacy contrasts and the study of composition and rhetoric are difficult to discern.

Aural/Visual Roots

Scattered throughout the correspondence in the Walter J. Ong Manuscript Collection are accounts of what Fr. Ong calls his central discovery, an account of which can be found in Nielson’s “A Bridge Builder: Walter J. Ong at 80.” About this discovery, Ong explains,:

It happened while I was doing my dissertation research in France […]. I was reading Rudoph Bultmann, the Protestant theologian, who made reference to the idea that knowing, for the Hebrews, had to do with hearing and sound, while the Greeks thought of knowing as related to seeing. I guess it took me about a day, but suddenly I could see how the whole thing fit together (404).

Issues of orality and literacy aren’t just issues about spoken and written words but of how we organize and perceive the world in terms of acoustic and visual space. Both rhetoric and poetics, Ong explains in his unfinished manuscript Language as Hermeneutic: A Primer on the Word and Digitization, has its origins in the Greek word mythos and the Indo-European root meduh, which “signifies to reflect, think over, consider – activities interior to the human being” (1-2). Logic and dialectic, on the other hand, he explains, have their origins in the Greek logos, which has connotations of “computation, reckoning, account of money handled, hence treatment of cognitive matters in terms of discrete units—which are the basis of digitization” and the Indo-European root leg-, which is based upon “a spatialized, exteriorized visual and/or tactile metaphor” (2).

For a more detailed discussion of Ong’s exploration of the sensorium and the aural/oral-visual roots in Ong’s exploration of orality and literacy, see The Presence of the Word, “‘I See What You Say’: Sense Analogues for Intellect,” and, to a lesser extent, Ramus, Method and the Decay of Dialogue.

What Breaking Ong’s Work Down to Orality->Literacy->Secondary Orality Misses

Another point I would like to make is that all too often when we discuss the oral-to-visual shift Ong describes in his work, we simplify it to just three stages: orality, literacy, and secondary orality. What this oversimplification leaves out is Ong’s concepts of primary orality (and its distinction from oralism), textuality, residual orality, digitization, secondary literacy and secondary visualism. Furthermore, this oversimplification gives the impression of a simple linear progression of technological development which Ong never intended, a point he makes explicit in the “Complications and Overlappings” section of chapter 2 of The Presence of the Word. In other words, Ong gave us a number of terms and concepts that far too few of us make use of.

Provisional nature

While Ong gave us these terms, he never intended for his work to be the final say. As a Jesuit priest, he believed that as time progresses God reveals to us more and more of Creation. Ong believed that his role, as both a priest and a scholar, was to describe God’s Creation as we currently understood it. I can’t stress this point enough as it means that Ong believed his work to always be provisional and always subject to revision as we learn more and more about the universe. He discusses this issue most fully in the essays “Knowledge in Time” and “Secular Knowledge and Revealed Religion,” and he makes explicit the provisional nature of his ideas in Orality & Literacy in the chapter “Some Psychodynamics of Orality.”

Before he lists the ten characteristics of orally based thought, he explains:

This inventory of characteristics is not presented as exclusive or conclusive but as suggestive, for much more work and reflection is needed to deepen understanding of orally based thought (and thereby understanding chiographically based thought, typographically based thought, and electronically based thought). (36)

This crucial qualification is almost always left out of discussions of this chapter, most notably in Beth Daniell’s “Against the Great Leap Theory of Literacy.” When working with Ong’s terminology and concepts, we need to regard Ong’s work as a framework to extend, to develop, to push forward, and to push against.

Secondary Orality, Secondary Literacy, and Secondary Visualism

While Fr. Ong told me he wasn’t sure what to make of all this, the fact of the matter is that he had put much thought into it, and he had presented his ideas, both in an interview with Kleine and Gale, published in Composition Forum in 1996, and in some public lectures. To wrap up my comments, I want to end with a brief discussion of how Ong defined secondary orality, secondary literacy, and secondary visualism.

About secondary orality, he explains to Kleine and Gale that he began using the term, he meant the orality associated with radio and television, and he called it “secondary orality” because of its heavy reliance upon literacy and technologies enabled by literacy:

When I first used the term ‘secondary orality,’ I was thinking of the kind of orality you get on radio and television, where oral performance produces effects somewhat like those of ‘primary orality,’ the orality using the unprocessed human voice, particularly in addressing groups, but where the creation of orality is of a new sort. Orality here is produced by technology. Radio and television are ‘secondary’ in the sense that they are technologically powered, demanding the use of writing and other technologies in designing and manufacturing the machines which reproduce voice. They are thus unlike primary orality, which uses no tools or technology at all. Radio and television provide technologized orality. This is what I originally referred to by the term ‘secondary orality.’ (Kleine and Gale 80)

In the interview, Ong addresses the problem of oral-like characteristics in online written discourse by simultaneously acknowledging its oral-like features while at the same time establishing written discourse as something visual rather than aural-oral. He, in fact, coins the term “secondary literacy” which I brought up with him some years later:

I have also heard the term ‘secondary orality’ lately applied by some to other sorts of electronic verbalization which are really not oral at all—to the Internet and similar computerized creations for text. There is a reason for this usage of the term. In nontechnologized oral interchange, as we have noted earlier, there is no perceptible interval between the utterance of the speaker and the hearer’s reception of what is uttered. Oral communication is all immediate, in the present. Writing, chirographic or typed, on the other hand, comes out of the past. Even if you write a memo to yourself, when you refer to it, it’s a memo which you wrote a few minutes ago, or maybe two weeks ago. But on a computer network, the recipient can receive what is communicated with no such interval. Although it is not exactly the same as oral communication, the network message from one person to another or others is very rapid and can in effect be in the present. Computerized communication can thus suggest the immediate experience of direct sound. I believe that is why computerized verbalization has been assimilated to secondary ‘orality,’ even when it comes not in oral-aural format but through the eye, and thus is not directly oral at all. Here textualized verbal exchange registers psychologically as having the temporal immediacy of oral exchange. To handle such technologizing of the textualized word, I have tried occasionally to introduce the term ‘secondary literacy.’ We are not considering here the production of sounded words on the computer, which of course are even more readily assimilated to ‘secondary orality.’ (Kleine and Gale 80-81)

While Ong mentions secondary literacy in the Composition Forum interview, his brief treatment of secondary visualism exists only in unpublished lectures found in the Walter J. Ong Manuscript Collection. The most detailed discussion is from a lecture given to students in Saint Louis University’s Aquinas Institute of Theology on 6 October 1995. About secondary visualism, Fr. Ong says: “Secondary orality is now accompanied by secondary visualism: computerized texts, graphics, etc. Ultimately, ‘virtual reality’” (“Secondary Orality and Secondary Visualism” 3).

Works Cited

Daniell, Beth. “Against the Great Leap Theory of Literacy.” PRE/TEXT 7 (Fall-Winter 1986): 181-93.

Elbow, Peter. Vernacular Eloquence: What Speech Can Bring to Writing. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012.

Kleine, Michael and Frederic Gale. “The Elusive Presence of the Word: An Interview with Walter Ong.” Composition Forum 7.2 (1996): 65-86.

Nielson, Mark. “A Bridge Builder: Walter J. Ong at 80.” America 167.16 (Nov. 21, 1992): 404-406.

Ong, Walter J. “Before Textuality: Orality and Interpretation.” Oral Tradition 3.3 (1988): 259-69; Rpt. in Faith and Contexts. Vol. 3: Further Essays, 1952-1990. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995. 215-25.

—. “Comment: Voice, Print, and Culture.” The Journal of Typographic Research 4.1 (1970): 77-83.

—. “Digitization Ancient and Modern: Beginnings of Writing and Today’s Computers.” Communication Research Trends 18.2 (1998): 4-21. Rpt. in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2002. 527-49.

—. “Hermeneutic Forever: Voice, Text, Digitization, and the ‘I.’” Oral Tradition 10.1 (1995): 3-36. Rpt. in Faith and Contexts. Vol. 4: Additional Studies and Essays 1947-1996. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999. 183-203.

—. “‘I See What You Say’: Sense Analogues for Intellect.” Human Inquiries: Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry 10.1-3 (1970): 22-42. Rpt. in Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977. 122-44. Rpt. in Faith and Contexts. Vol. 3: Further Essays, 1952-1990. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul Soukup. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995. 91-111.

—. “Knowledge in Time.” Introduction to Knowledge and the Future of Man: An International Symposium. Ed. Walter J. Ong. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1968. 3-38. Rpt. in Faith and Contexts. Vol. 1. Selected Essays and Studies, 1952-1991. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. Intro. Farrell. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992. 127-53.

—. Language as Hermeneutic: A Primer on the Word and Digitization. Ts. Walter J. Ong Manuscript Collection. Pius XII Memorial Library, Saint Louis University.

—. “Oralism to Online Thinking.” Explorations in Media Ecology 2.1 (2003): 43-4.

—. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen, 1982.

—. The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena of Religious History. The Terry Lectures. New Haven: Yale UP, 1967.

—. Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1958.

—. “Secondary Orality and Secondary Visualism.” Ts. Walter J. Ong Manuscript Collection. Pius XII Memorial Library, Saint Louis University.

—. “Secular Knowledge, Revealed Religion, and History.” Religious Education 52.5 (1957): 341-49; Rpt as “Secular Knowledge and Revealed Religion” in American Catholic Crossroads: Religious-Secular Encounters in the Modern World. New York: The Macmillian Company, 1959. 74-95.

—. “Text as Interpretation: Mark and After.” Oral Tradition in Literature: Interpretation in Context. Ed. John Miles Foley. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1986. 147-69. Rpt. in Faith and Contexts. Vol. 2. Supplementary Studies. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992. 191-210.

♣ Categories

♣ Archives

♣ Blogroll

  • A Collage of Citations
  • buildbetterbarrel
  • cbd
  • Cheap Bohemian
  • Collin vs. Blog, 2.0
  • CultureCat
  • Daniel Anderson, Writing Pusher
  • Daughter of Schenectady Synecdoche
  • Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
  • Digital Sextant
  • Heuretics
  • In the Middle
  • Jerz's Literacy Weblog
  • Jonathan Goodwin
  • Kairosnews
  • kind of . . .
  • Lance Strate's Blog Time Passing
  • Life with Lucia
  • medievalism
  • Nineteen Keystrokes
  • Not Your Mama's Gamer
  • on the process of
  • Planned Obsolescence
  • Professional Tip of the Day
  • Punctum Books Blog
  • Rodger T. Whitson, Ph.D
  • Stephanie Schlitz's Blog
  • stevendkrause.com/
  • Still Water blog
  • Technoliteracy
  • Text Technologies
  • The Blue Fuse
  • The Forgotten Canon
  • The Ruminate
  • The Smithy
  • Vitia
  • Woode-walkers
  • Work Space
  • Wormtalk and Slugspeak
  • Wynken de Worde
  • Yellow Dog

♣ Meta

  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.org

Proudly powered by WordPress Theme: Chateau by Ignacio Ricci.