Night thoughts of writer

This blog will continue its political bent. But for the moment it feels appropriate to draw out to dicuss some of the other great threads of life in culture and society. However first, glass of wine in hand, its worth reconsidering the mere act of writing itself.

To be honest, I havn't thought of myself as a writer for many a year. It was at best an early dream to overcome my crippling failure as a student in normal society. Year 12 and its strictures simply did not suit me. Fittingly it has taken a documentary on Hunter S. Thompson to revive those long lost thoughts. Ironically, it was an interaction with another HST junkie several years ago that led me off that path. The boy was some non-descript fool who thought drugs were the path to enlightenment and great writing (I'm yet to see his name on a book spine, though havn't bothered to look).

When I read Hunter S. Thompson, -though only at his best- I can almost feel the heartbeat of the writer behind the symbols, the calculating but impulsive drive to find not just some words, but the right word for each circumstance. In reading Hunter you feel taken into the writers confidence. Like Kerouac, or in touches Hemmingway and Faulkner, Hunter gave you a sense of having read the first draft straight off his typewriter. In that way he was the original blogger, though he would abuse us all for the term, and decry the slovern nature of bloggers who think their unprepared, unpolished thoughts worthy of mass consumption. Hunter was never unpolished, never unprepared, never quite the raw immediate edge which his writing seemed to imply.

Hunter was never in a word, unprofessional.


If anything is my objection to this odious tag blogger, (and I guess now to my fellow colleagues) it is the asserted but never evidenced claim that the authentic mouth rattling out his thoughts is more worthy of consideration than a dozen professionals, with their carefully edited and crafted thoughts. Much like the Republican parties objectification of Sarah Palin as a leader of the American people because of her connection to the American people, these bloggers assert that their rejection of the mainstream media somehow represents their qualification for being real commentators on the american dream.

I've always thought there is something intoxicating in this whole writing process. Its long held and celebrated connection to booze only adds to this mythos. Writing at its purist asserts the direct translation of thoughts to physical symbols. In some ways the illusiory character of the letters doesn't matter, what counts is the process that connect mind to reality. To push from consciousness to practice.

Philosophy has spent 2000 years failing to guarantee us this link. Physics has to institute a dozen never seen, felt or smelt particles to somehow connect the noumenal to the phenomenal. Chemistry, Maths, Religion are no help here at all other than vainly wishing 'what you see is what you get'. As always doubts linger..

But with writing we know instinctively that the link is never in doubt. The entire endeavour has no purpose other than forging that link. Where we, the audience, pull away, where we come to doubt the authors honesty or effort, it is because he has broken the connection between his mind and word. And that is the writers bond.

I cant quite credibly claim to the title of writer these days. The headline of this post is a lie. But the churning beast still lies within me. And it has taken a reconnoiter with Hunter S. Thompson to bring it out. A man, who in life and death never betrayed that demand. We met his mind in his writing. He was a writer.

I miss Hunter.

I miss reading what he would have thought about Barack Obama. He would have liked Tuesday night. He wouldn't have been agreeable. He couldn't have been disagreed with. But he would always have held that connection. We should all be so lucky.