Self-Flanderization and the Living Word
I read this article about self-flanderization and found it interesting. I didn’t know the concept before and I am glad I read it. I had been looking at Bear trending and like a clown was wondering what gets votes and whatnot.
The article was about what we choose to write about and how looking at other things that become popular or liked can kind of change the way we think about what we should write. If people like the things that we write, we start to optimize towards maybe continuing with those types of subjects and we kind of focus on that which other people like. And this is kind of an optimization, I guess, of our writing towards other people's opinions or likes.
Where do we get our words to write about? When you're overly online, you are reading what other people are writing and you're seeing the popular stuff and you want to be contributing to those popular topics and so on. It's kind of a mimetic spiral, I guess. Whereas if you're offline, we're living in a normal real world — you think and write about what's in your world.
I've been reading poems with people recently, in a group. It's been just fascinating really, the richness of the writing that we've come into with these poems. And it has been a rich conversation — each person contributes a kind of a different view or a different thing to bring out in the poem based on their experience or whatever. And it's not a mimetic kind of experience in that environment; it's just everyone kind of contributing, kind of putting some of their experience into this kind of stone soup of reading and discussing poems together.
I used to know a poet who told me how he worked—a little bit, very little—but he said that it was like prayer to some degree. He said he would sit in his chair and kind of wait and maybe kind of hold space open or mentally just kind of zone out until the words came to him, and he would then take a crayon or a pastel or some kind of a large marker and he would kind of just record word by word things that were popping up in his mind.
Stanely Kunitz once said, in poetry, there's the sacred word and then there's the living word. The sacred word, I guess, were old poems and the living word is poems being written now. But it's an interesting topic because I think there's also the algorithmic word, and we're living in that now, of course, with all of this AI and internet crap. But now it's kind of mathematically generated and served up to you, and we're being served up things by which we become mathematically attracted to, and that becomes part of our circular desire to create more text to kind of satisfy that dynamic, etc.
It’s slightly ironic I know to ramble on about this because I was sparked by a text online, and by being online, even over online today when I should have been doing other things. I am trying to at least recognize that a bit and I am trying to write from my lived experience more, versus just contributing to the wash cycle of the internet ‘take’ machine. Poems, especially pre-internet era poems can be a good guide for us I think.
That being said it's still probably highly worth revisiting the idea of the living word—tapping into, or holding open space for words from our own experience in some way divorced from the hyper-memetic nature of the algorithmic word.