February 2004 Archives

In his blog entry about the blank page, Clark apologizes for not talking about the white space of the screen. At first hand the blank page and the blank screen look remarkably alike. Both are white, empty spaces. Both have boundaries. Both are spaces for writing.

The two are different in obvious ways, however. You can the throw the page into a trash can. You can throw a digital page into a metaphorical trashcan, but the trashcan on a computer is just that: a metaphor, an icon, a sign of something familiar in the world. There's a tactile difference. I've known writers who say they prefer the contact with paper, but there are times when I'm writing on a screen that I hear the rhythm of my writing in the stroke of keys. The keyboard seems to talk, and I find myself talking back as I read aloud softly as I type along. What seems a difference in the two writing spaces is the ability to see alterations, revisions, cross outs, the intellectual and creative messiness of writing, easy to see on a piece of paper but often missing on the screen. Yet most high end word processors have tracking features, and web-based Wikis are even more promising in tracking changes. All in all, writing on the two spaces physically isn't that much different.

But do our brains meld with paper and the screen in different ways? A lot has been written about different ways of writing and reading hypertexts, especially with reading hypertexts, which require a different kind of writing than paper based writing, though even that point is argued, some saying Joyce was one of the first hypertext writers.

To follow: Part II

Ron Silliman writes in his blog this afternoon about a poet with whom he will be reading this coming weekend, kari edwards. He says she "seems not to believe in the existence of blank pages," based on his reception of her book, idun. Then he goes on to describe as best he can what edwards is attempting to do with text, verbal image, content, meaning throughout the pages of the book.

This gets me to thinking, is there such a thing as a blank page, other than metaphorically? I need to take care here that I don't play word games or games with peoples' ordinary sense of that old shill, "staring at a blank page." The metaphor, of course refers not to the piece of paper but to the writer, or more specifically, to his available storehouse of images, tropes, opinions, observations, understandings, proclivities, etc. The metaphor would not have been available to Homer, presumably, as it presupposes a literate (visual) frame of reference.

But to get back on track. You have before you a so-called blank sheet of paper. You must fill it. As a minimalist, you might fill it with a word or two. As a practitioner of stream-of-consciousness writing, you will invade its very margins. But pre-speech act, before putting pen to paper, what exactly is there? Certainly not nothing, which is what one usually takes blank to mean.

Study it like you're Thomas Wolfe. That piece of pulp has (tells) a deep and complex history, extending backwards to a seedling in a woods that produced a tree that grew and eventually was harvested, processed, manufactured, packaged, marketed, sold, purchased, employed. I should say, extending backwards through the seedling, which fell far from or near to its parent, rode Jonah-like in the belly of some bird, and so on and so on. Is this history not an erasure of that page's blankness? And what if you were to consider the hand and purpose of the logger who harvested the tree, the trucker who trucked the log, the miller who reduced the wood to pulp, etc., etc.?

Or study it like you're Professor Agassiz. Examine it closely. If it's high quality paper, you'll find its watermark . . . somebody's text already inscribed faintly and permanently. The watermark is one of the most fascinating textual elements in the history of literary production, is it not? Beginning with its very name: a mark made in water! A message writ with water. Examine most watermarks and you're likely to find something more than a ghostly advertisement for the paper's manufacturer. You'll find the most elegant (i.e., most precious) design, a font put to the highest use. Watermarks function as crests, shields, heraldry. They say something about someone whose self-esteem grows in reverse proportion to the visibility of the mark. He need not be the manufacturer but the man as well of taste, and the wherewithal to express it so.

This examination can go on and on to many possibilities: the "rag" content of the paper itself. There's a story, don't you think? Paper is manufactured of more than wood pulp. It contains cotton, chemicals, graphite, or any number of the products of a civilization. Every page of paper carries with it, in its genetic code, so to speak, its own manufactured processes, its own technology.

We tend to think of the blank page as a place where writing starts. That's only a metaphor. How blank is it, after all? Not very. Better to think of it as a palimpsest: an archeological site. Making the writer something like a latter-day builder upon a very un-blank history. And every bit as unconscious of that which he builds upon.

P.S.: I've given the virtual blank page no shrift at all. I wonder how much of the same logic applies within the open spaces of electronic media? Well, that's for another time.