Author: Richard Beckham II

What is writing? According to Stephen King, it’s telepathy. My creative writing professor at UW, David Shields, said that it is more like consciousness than film. Hunter Thompson, with his invention of “Gonzo,” had the idea of a master journalist, a writer/director/producer/cameraman/artist/actor, who would document the events of the story he would cover in which he would play a main role — consciousness, essentially, but with an artistic spin.

I think they’re all a valid interpretation of what writing is or aspires to be. The eternal problem is that there is no perfect way to replicate life experience or its consciousness. So let’s assume that writing, at its most basic, is King’s definition: telepathy, something akin to consciousness and as close to natural thought as we can produce.

The most obvious next step, in terms of art forms to share human expression and consciousness, to further this idea of telepathy, would be one that relies on technology even more than film, which I believe has reached its full potential, or almost. With film, pure experience falls short. You cannot immerse yourself beneath one of the many shades of sadness the instant you turn on a movie. Instead, you have to sit through it and actively follow along, even if the visuals are as good, if not better, than our sense of vision.

The art form I imagine would be one of embedding experience directly into the mind of the receiver, implanting a feeling even more analogous to consciousness than film or writing. Real telepathy: an art medium of dreams. This would be the obvious next stage in the progression of art, the kind of inevitable progress Elon Musk talks about. But instead of using the technology for communication or translation or looking shit up online, it would be used for human expression and empathy — replicating the power of emotion itself, without the foreplay, without the hindrance of words and their definitions, the lack of which is the basis of so many misunderstandings and disagreements.

Now what does this have to do with writing? Well, what we experience with reading is, for now, the closest we have to what I’ve described, the closest medium to existing purely in the mind, like a dream, but with the most rudimentary technology involved. And it’s been around forever. Even speech, before writing, could elicit a trance-like state in the listener, could affect a person not unlike writing—telepathy. You live the narrator’s experience while you listen and imagine what they describe.

A lecture topic I presented for my MFA could help explain this telepathic experience: the proposition of a Quantum Literary Theory, wherein words and their meaning, the signifier and the signified, exist in two places at once: one in the writer’s mind at the time of writing and one in the reader’s mind at the time of reading. That is, the word and its meaning are entangled between two consciousnesses, two moments in space-time; not to mention that words themselves, when written in sequence, are not unlike Schrödinger’s Cat: both nonexistent and perhaps existent, until they are observed.

The entire dictionary, a lexicon, a whole galaxy of words, is omnipresent in our culture. This is a constant. The words are always out there like atoms and particles, things that were observed (that which is signified) or measured (by means of the signifier, through description, comparison, etc.). So, as a person is reading, there exists this entire lexicon all at once. You can anticipate the next word as you read a sentence or a paragraph. You can guess if the cat is alive or dead inside its box. And you can be right or wrong once the box is opened. But with reading, the process of observation and understanding is a gradual expression. With the cat, however, it’s a big reveal. I’m sure a comparison can also be made between Quantum Literary Theory and its words and Quantum Physics and its wave particles and how they don’t always behave as we expect, or how the act of observation may actually create what is observed (think quasars and the Bible Code — a “discovery” by picking and choosing exactly what you’re looking for to prove your assumption, no matter how far-fetched or irrational).

The point is that if an entire lexicon exists, then it must always exist, between each word. The space between each word is a blank space, oblivion, but at the same time it contains the potential of all words and their meanings, building the information the words are trying to convey in your mind along its course of expression. Thus, up until the instant the next word is written and read (existing in two places at once), the chances of that next word being any other word in the entire lexicon are the same. Only when the next word is written and read do those chances collapse. Only then do we know if the cat is dead or alive.

At the same time, we should know that word strings — sentences — should hold hands with each other, that the brain is pretty good about knowing what word should come next, and that sentences do hold hands for the most part. But I think this can be a difficult thing to do sometimes for unseasoned writers. Others may also say that adjoining sentences which merely graze fingertips, or are awkward high fives, are indications of brilliance, that the leaps between them (though sometimes artfully done and on key to the mind’s ear) are the intentions of genius. Hemingway said something about a writer’s awkwardness being construed as style, while Bukowski said that style is everything. It’s all relative to the reader. But beauty is “truth beauty” and when one feels it one knows.

Therefore the style, the telepathy, is the resonance between words and sentences, the blank space of the unknown, the dream time that a future technology might use to insert artificial emotion into a mind. And this space is not unlike the rests between musical notes. You can only get so much stimulation if you hold a single note without a rest or change. What kind of story would exist if it repeats one word, or is just one word? Granted, there might be a lot implied in that single note or word, and you might get a reaction, but there is still a blank space before and after in which to preconceive and ruminate. Nothing is permanent. So the meaning of words is contained in nothing; the potential of an entire lexicon is in between words. This indefinable space-time is where truth (and beauty) resides — an implied contradiction. You can read more about that in my other essay. For now, I’m done with this topic and ready to move on. If it resonates with you after the period at the end of this sentence, then maybe what I wrote has meaning.