On Bonfire Night

Today we are very happy to feature, as the second installment in our ongoing series on “The Future of Reading”, this surprising essay from Hinternet Associate Editor Sam Jennings, a London-based American writer, the author of the consistently excellent Vita Contemplativa, and a scholar and true lover of Renaissance English literature. Sam is one of the few writers out there with a voice so distinctive —our Founding Editor likes to boast: « Sam et moi, on fait école »—, that even when we, at moments, find our faculty of understanding surpassed by whatever it is he, with his long vision, is up to, we are more than happy to trust him and to stay passively packed in for the ride. We are reminded, ourselves, of the vision Bottom presents, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for a play of his own, which would feature some man or other who “must present Wall; and let him have some plaster, or some loam, or some roughcast about him, to signify ‘wall’.” We find ourselves eager indeed to “present Wall” to Sam’s Bottom — “Wall” here, being, of course, nothing other than The Hinternet itself. —The Editors

I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream—past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was — there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had— but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream. It shall be called “Bottom’s Dream” because it hath no bottom. And I will sing it in the latter end of a play before the duke. Peradventure, to make it the more gracious, I shall sing it at her death. —Bottom the Weaver, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (IV.1. 203-16)

1. A Letter to a Friend

Dear Friend,

Well— it would seem I have the considerable fortune, or considerable burden, of talking about the next stage of the Future of Reading in the wake of the newest Trumpian Conquest. Exactly what the man and his entourage have conquered remains to be seen. But for all those accelerationists out there, who until now were bleeding in the message boards over the need for institutional collapse, it seems safe to say their dreams are about to come true, and the future of many an American institution looks, today, that much more bleak.

But before I join in on wishing our institutions a bittersweet farewell— let me wander a little, if I may, through the vagaries of literacy, and the strange future of that strange human faculty, and don’t judge too harshly if the conclusions I reach seem as gray and muddled as the future itself.

What is the Future of Reading? Well, what is its Past? Why do we appear to be losing some of our capacity for it? Why would we want to retire a skill (and a world!) which seems to have benefitted us so much? There’s a particularly fusty Victorian in my head, and I argue about this with him, vociferously, and often. His name is something haughty like Reginald, he’s some species of antiquarian, and our arguments nearly always revolve around whether literacy was a kind of Darwinian accident, and whether that accident was a good one. This Victorian part of my brain, which loves to quote dramatically in aureate Latin, is always prating on about how, without The Book, the very foundational Delphic, and subsequently Socratic, commandment to “Know thyself” would never have reached its furthest dimensions. Never mind that Socrates hated writing (or really that Plato wrote him as hating writing; already you see the horrible labyrinth of meanings all this damned literacy gets us into).

As Walter Ong tells us, for oral cultures “meaning” is a sound which appears and then is gone. Memory is a passage between speaker and hearer, and it only goes so far back as a person can speak about a landscape, or a story, or a dream. The word has a direct referent in the world: the meaning is the thing it means, the thing it refers to directly, as occurring in the actual world. In Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982), Ong tells the story of an illiterate peasant who was asked to describe himself:

A peasant aged 36, asked what sort of person he was, responded with touching and humane directness: “What can I say about my own heart? How can I talk about my character? Ask others; they can tell you about me. I myself can’t say anything.”

The implications of that! That we have settled so far into selfhood. Into severe internal judgment. But not so in the old world of orality. “There is no way to refute the world of orality,” writes Ong. “All you can do is walk away from it into literacy.” All our self-examinations— such a modern conceit. The oral world is a world of constant redundancy and repetition: the same strong characters, the same epithets. It can’t afford to lose a thing because in its context memory is very hard-earned. So all who would romanticize the ancient “pre-literate” tribal world must also accept that such a world would deny them the right to want different things. You cannot desire your own way of doing things when the homeostasis of the group depends on you completing a role. So we see the pain of individualism, and its increasing, nauseating necessity.

Dammit— but this is just the fusty Victorian creeping into my head again, with his literate arguments. “Know thyself” indeed: it turns out the trouble with orality and literacy is that literacy can make a study of orality, but not vice versa. Our path out of orality is ineluctable. Once we’ve begun to conceive of language in a line, our memory is altered. It becomes something which stretches far back, but now also points forward. We can return and remember the things we’ve spoken. We can go back and repeat the words written there. History appears: so does abstraction. Words become hard things, not just sounds, and they can even refer to things we’ve never seen. The dream-world becomes the word-world, and ancient visions grow stacked and threaded through one another: the work of a devious Weaver, weaving the now-implicit cosmic Book out of human lives and writings.

And yet— Romantic that I am, and an always-ardent Sancho Panza to whichever Don Quixote I happen to be following (that is reading)— I’m still haunted by deep ambivalence. I’ve spent so long reading and believing in reading, and what have I to show for it? What deep, interior selfhood or understanding have I gleaned or strained from all that effort? Only this creeping sense: that this business of trying to know ourselves is a wonderful joke, which like all the best jokes, is not really a joke on us (not the product of a truly indifferent cosmos), but a booming cosmic laugh, sounding across the fine edge between joy and fear.

But recent events have shown me that I know this much: what is best in reading —or in life— comes lightest. No ponderous, heavy, serious obligation, but a lithe dance, a roundelay, an adventure on the tail of another Quixote. It’s the Vision which I’ve described before— the very Visionary Tradition itself. It’s the product of that secret Weaver. But now I find it hard to write much more. Instead, I’ve sent you the speech I was asked to give at Bonfire Night, a few weeks ago (enclosed below). Read it, and you’ll see what I really had to say about that particular Weaver, and his Bottomless dreaming. Because it turned out to be a much different occasion —and a much different speech— than I expected. Despite all my ambivalence, despite my doubts, a passionate cry came out of me that night. I didn’t know I was still capable of that.

Your loyal, patient friend,

Sam

2. A Speech on Bonfire Night

Thank you for being here today, my friends, as we prepare the effigy for lighting. I’m an American, so as yet unsure of your customs, but intrigued to see what the day’s all about. Though if you’ll permit me, I’ve been asked to say a few words about the future of reading. In a somewhat roundabout way, however, I want to start by talking about a vision. Or rather: the Vision. The one that keeps on being had, and which I think had no better authorizer than the very Brit who brought us the divine Bottom, the Holy Fool and Weaver, and that magnificent quote from the Midsummer’s Dream, with which we began this evening’s celebration. If you’ll permit me, I’d like to speak the speech one more time (trippingly on the tongue, of course):

[Here I spoke Bottom’s speech again.]

What words! What magnificent words. I thought of this great speech recently, while reading another discussion of the future of reading— a frustrating, yet fantastic, piece from one D. Graham Burnett, a most attentive man. It was an essay in which he discussed reading an especially prolix piece of prose, itself all about attention. And the irony of being exhausted by it. Well, all ironies are deep wells containing earthy truths, I say. And you know, for whatever reason, it put me in mind of the glorious Bottom. My favorite Shakespearean.

Gloss those words again: I have had a most rare vision. Tonight I want to expand and expound on just what that Vision is. You see—

3. An Interruption

At this moment, the microphone cut out and the crowd descended into some small chaos, before a rogue microphone began relaying an entirely different speech, projected from some speakers on the other side of the park. It went on for a few minutes until it was discovered and turned off (though who exactly was speaking, we still don’t know), and my own speech resumed. Those who attempted to copy down the interruption agree it went something like this:

… rather, we may think of the last few centuries of literacy, essentially, as a fitful attempt to make our collected human understanding commonly available. Though as much as we are inherently curious in our nature, this is a deeply counterintuitive way to behave. The way of “the world”—the simple, basic fabric of human actions— is now, and always has been, one of sublime disinterest in our own origins. It was true in the world of orality, and has only been partially submerged by the slide into literacy. We are, often, and to a fault, dismayingly practical creatures, far more concerned with our day-to-day tasks, and the web of our relations, and our work, and the behavior of nations, than we are with understanding why we’re doing what we’re doing, or where our behavior came from, or where our habits originated. We may think we’ve surpassed the stereotypical medieval picture, in which the layman labored at his craft, drank when he was bored, sang, fought, pissed on barn walls, and quibbled over wills and dowries, oblivious to calendar dates whatsoever, in his seasonal living blissfully unaware of the rarefied learning or philosophical investigations of monks and clerks and princes. But is it any different now? Does the average person in our own century ever consider where the graphite in a pencil comes from? Do they stop to wonder when computers first had screens? Do they set out to discover why they use the words they use, or how old those words are, or what they used to mean? We are, all of us, living our lives on the edifices of centuries of human effort and work and development, largely unconscious of the particularities, largely disinclined to worry too much over that exhausting and never-satisfied question, “Why?” So it may be that what we’re watching begin —and what may carry on through the next century— is the gradual ending, or at least the transformation, of this brief, strange, experimental era when, for a moment, the educational and artistic ideals of many people became very much concerned with these kinds of speculations. But even more than that: concerned with believing that these speculations ought to be the accessible property of anyone. If so, we are, perhaps, ending our painful, fitful relationship with mass literacy and democratized knowledge— things that were missing from the vastly greater part of human history anyhow. We may indeed be returning to a world in which knowledge is once again restricted to the elite, entirely specialized, and rare…

It is approximately here that the interruption was shut off.

4. The Remainder of the Speech

Well, now I’ve totally forgotten where I was. And yet it doesn’t matter. I’d intended to talk to you all tonight about why I feel, at bottom, largely uncertain about the Future of Reading. In fact, I’d intended to spend the entire time talking about Bottom’s speech, and about esoteric visions, but in a way really designed to distract myself and yourselves completely from the actual subject at hand. But, my friends, this interruption has stirred something in me, though I’m not sure just what. And if I am to finish this speech, it has to be in a way I myself was not expecting. Now I find I must respond to this distressing interruption with a strength and certainty I did not know I possessed until this moment. Forgive me, but my Romantic nature has asserted itself here, and I have become ungovernable.

I intended to talk about Walter Ong, and the transformation of our psychology with writing and, eventually, with print. To talk about the change to literacy from orality, the emergence of what Ong calls secondary orality (radio, television, etc.). I wanted to say, well, we won’t be able totally to do away with literacy. We’ll all need to be able to read microwave programming instructions, and street-signs. Yet we may very well use our technology to do away with the need for any kind of knowledge. It seems to me unfair to say our oral ancestors didn’t have knowledge. They had extraordinary sets of knowledge. We have our own. But now perhaps the threat is a total loss and lack of both, through our technology. The love of technology is a malady I’m glad I don’t have. Yet even I have to appreciate it, and admit that I do not know what I would be without the technology of the written word. I can’t escape the feeling that my life would have in fact lacked life. That my world would have been impossibly impoverished. And yet, this is the perspective of someone contemplating not having a gift he already has. But it is a gift. I can’t pretend otherwise.

I believe in reading towards Vision. I disbelieve all other kinds. What does this mean? Literature as opposed to fragmentation; literature as a slow and incremental construction. Show me no more deconstructionists— where are the reconstructionists? Why would you tear down the spectacular edifice just to say: “Alas, we can no longer believe in buildings!” Because I have seen buildings, and many of them are beautiful. And we have to go on living somewhere. The history of reading is a history of interconnectedness, of literature as a history of a cosmic mind, speaking to itself through time, a transtemporal memory. If you cannot see this when you read, then you are not really reading. And so I would at least say this: do we really know why we’re reading? Have we thought enough about what we want from reading? Perhaps we haven’t even begun to read well. Perhaps because we’re post-moderns; how strange is that! Modernity, being the period which invented periodicity, got to declare itself the true Modernity. And we must now be post- ! How embarrassing.  

And how embarrassed we are with the metaphysical! Yet our literacy truly is akin to a religious or mythological experience: a Fall from some figured innocence, into experience. In William Blake’s terms, the next step after experience has to be an “organized innocence”— a phrase I’ll never fall out of love with. Where is the organized innocence today? Let me return to Shakespeare, to Shakespeare’s Bottom, weaving new innocence out of experience and dream. Since Shakespeare is still the ultimate example of what it means to read towards Vision. Shakespeare seems so modern to us post-moderns because modernity is based on Shakespeare. Every fresh new academic humanist fights this fact but only finds new ways of saying the same, whether lovingly or pejoratively. Yet the academic humanists cannot admit that what they study is a metaphysical —a cosmic— thing! Not an empirical science. Bottom the weaver is representative of every person transformed by reading, or by art, or experience itself. I aspire to be Bottom with every creative undertaking. With Bottom’s speech, Shakespeare articulates to us, more beautifully than anyone ever has, what it means to dream and to wake and want to share with the world the vision one has dreamt.

Then what of all those academics? And their institutions? I think we could stand to learn from the Lollards here in England, or from the later Puritan revolution of the 17th century. Their undermining of their own institutions. The fear they caused in authorities, because they were reading the Bible for themselves. The priests and bishops were running scared. Our own priests today are running scared— witness our academies. See how experts grow terrified at mass medical skepticism. They see they’re losing power over what is acceptable to think, and what is not. But imagine a population of people who read the classics for themselves, far away from the academies!

You know, the Church of England and the Scottish Presbyterian Church were afraid at one time because too many poor artisans were learning to read? And of all people, they were most afraid of weavers, who seemed to read the most. Weavers! We are back to weaving again— what a man or a woman may discover, when they turn their heads to learning something on their own, in the midst of their own quiet work. “Death to the Institutions” may indeed be a fine cry, if by it we mean every man and woman can now read the woven history of literature for themselves.

It comes down to this: as institutions collapse, as politics devours the social world, and exhaustion sets in; as reading becomes harder and harder to do —harder to find the attention for— it becomes paradoxically more important. And it becomes more important that we read the best that has been written and thought, and chuck out all the popular nonsense which distracts people from that transtemporal cosmic Book. So we are in a collapse. So people cannot read. Well, then: the people whose lives have been changed, transformed utterly, by literacy —or by “the Book” more broadly— these people are now in the position of being like religious converts, in the midst of a mass exodus to atheism. But we cannot assume, simply because the mass may be moving towards non-belief, or towards indifference to the Word, that we’re wrong to try to persuade them otherwise.

That is: we must become punks of attention. We must become proselytizers by example. And yet our persuasion must be subtle— deeper, not blind to the incoming world. I believe and know plenty of people who feel that the history of literature and literacy is the highest and greatest part of human history. The greatest form of life. Why would I give up this belief so easily? Why wouldn’t I be like some early Christian, looking around at my culture and beginning to conceive of ways to show people what I’ve experienced— what I believe to be the deep, spiritual truth of my transformation? What the ages were so busy weaving, the new age must find out. For I have had a most rare vision. And I will make a play of it, and show the world. And I will call it Bottom’s dream, for it hath no bottom… what else is there to do? What do I have to lose?

Now let’s light the effigy. Remember, remember. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you.

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Sam Jennings is an American writer based in London. Read him on Substack at Vita Contemplativa.