25. Writing as transmission

If you stop to think about it, writing is a torturous path for passing on knowledge.

• I have an experience.

• I reduce it down to a few distinct thoughts about that experience.

• I write it down, editing it as I go to make it sound more professional or authoritative. My writing is no longer just the experience, it is also assuring the reader that I am worth reading.

• I publish it somewhere (and, yes, that does matter – arguably scientific journals are among the most authoritative writings, yet how many of us read them?).

• You read it. Or do you? You glance through it? You are drawn in by the headline or the choice of images. You read it straight away, whilst doing something else? Or waiting for something else? Or you bookmark it in order to come back at a better time.

• Anyway, you read it.

• Is your language my language? How does that affect your reading of it?

• Are my authority markers familiar to you? Or does my language feel overly stiff and awkward?

• Nevermind, you make the effort. You read the words. You understand the words.

But do you get the experience that I'm sharing?

I have compressed a thousand subtle conscious and unconscious sensations into 500 words. Should I have any hope that you'll get the thousand sensations back out again?

I was struggling to write this piece a while ago, and told a friend. Write it as a poem, he suggested. Well, I can assure you that I didn't – I am not a poet, as my school teachers liked to point out – so we're all safe there.

Poetry is something I studied at school^[1] with more or less engagement. The black words on white paper, arrayed in uneven lines with deliberate spacings that spoke silently to the author's intent, were parsed lesson after lesson.

They were interrrogated again on my bed or at my desk in the evenings. Somewhere between the smell of the books, the glyphs on the page, the darkness and chill out beyond the window, the poet's meaning was being offered up to me. If only I had the eyes, the heart, and the patience to find it!

And thus poetry was a foreign country.

We had guides, of course. For too short a while, Miss Maxwell whose youthful ease and smile wooed all the adolescent boys; a now-anonymous man financing his PhD study of early Persian poetry by sitting uncomfortably in front of a room of teenagers who knew he didn't want to be there; and Mrs. Eatough, whose late-middle-aged body languished across her desk and oozed sensuous life into every word she uttered.

But they required us to interrogate the poems, to scan the lines, to identify the metre, to highlight instances of onomatopoeia, alliteration, assonance, enjambment. We were apprentice mechanics taking a car apart to isolate, identify, and appraise the value of each component.

We were never shown how to put the car together again. Nor encouraged to build a car of our own, not even a go-kart. We never even knew of the magic that the master mechanics had in their fingers, nor their reasons for doing their work.

The poet was never invited to reach out from the book into my classroom and touch my heart with his.

Poems are taught as objects to be studied and deciphered.

Poems are written as encounters with the divine.