“Out of the Dark Emerging…”: Encountering Alterity, or, The Inevitable Divergence of Colliding Phenomena

At the moment that we encounter alterity, each diverts the “other” from their path, and their material body is altered in such a way that, as Derick Attridge puts forward in The Singularity of Literature, when one encounters the other one encounters “not the other as such … but the remolding of the self that brings the other into being as, necessarily, no longer entirely other (23).” This idea of the other being at once separate from the writing entity and, upon convergence with said entity, becoming an inherent part of them, opens up the phenomenon I wish to evaluate here. The writing entity may refer to either the writer who manifests the other upon the page as they are writing/after they have written, or the location where the writing had occurred, which then becomes other when it enters the world and comes into contact with the entity involved in reading the other, making both entities an other to each other. We will dwell more heavily in the former example: the process of manifesting the immaterial other in the material world via textual phenomenon. This model of writing implies the influence of the Yet-Unmanifest which is the root of all literary textual phenomena and the dictator of the rule for encountering all such phenomena; the writing of every unique text brings into creation the essence of the Yet-Unmanifest via the particular and inventive formation of that essence into the solidity of form. Though we know that from the Absolute Unmanifest was longtime past begotten the Practically Infinite Plane of Manifested and To-Be-Manifested Phenomena, thereby displacing the Yet-Unmanifest phenom of creative writing to a secondary pool of conceptual sources derived from experience and reading (and also the unprovable influence of Human Intuition into the Absolute), we assert that the Yet-Unmanifest text of writing via the writing agent comes, by way of a complicated metaphysical transition from Absolute-to-Conditioned being, from that Absolute realm from which all writing is begotten in common. The invention and creation of the writing agent warrants their body’s “ownership” of the resulting textual formation, but, again, only in body—in sentence structure, tone, meter, and vocabulary: the things that make up literature as a phenomenon separate from continuous human reality, and that which gives to each individual authored piece of literary text their “authoredness.”

“What exactly am I doing as my fingers press the keys and my eyes scan the screen?” asks Attridge (17). This sentence is the form that the writer has chosen to embody an Absolute, universal quandary which is: what constitutes the act of writing? Any person can conceive of this question—and even write it down—but the fact that the sentence containing the conceit has been placed in quotation marks and attributed to a page in a text authored by Attridge proves that authorship is conditioned by form, not content; and that the activity of writing may be organized pyramidally—as a hierarchy: proceeding from the formation of sentences by a writing agent (briefly described in the Attridge quote) there is the level at which the public experiences the writing, when the text is channeled into human expression from one to another, or as expression produced in the reader in response to the text; preceding the formation of the sentences by the writer there is the world of creation in which the ideas channeled from the yet higher plane of Unmanifest ideas begin to find their form (they take shape) in the mind of the writer. Thus the hierarchy of the activity of writing descends as follows: (0) The inaccessible Absolute Unmanifest from which the entirety of human ideas has already been borne into the reality of human accessibility in (1) the world of Origination where the infinitude of human ideas floats ethereal, ready to be plucked by one archangel of authorship (or, a muse) and worked into a general unique and literary shape in (2) the world of Creation, in which the crudely shaped essence of the content is further worked into a form which manifests in (3) the world of Formation, and is then conveyed via the form of the text as “created” by the author to the masses in (4) the world of Expression.

The (0) plane of the Absolute Unmanifest cannot be comprehended by human minds, and so it would be foolish to do anything but praise it, for it is no thing, nothing, hollowed, hollow, whole, and holy. The (1) plane of the Yet-Unmanifest Origination of All Thing does not attain the divine heights of Absolute noumena, but it is nevertheless in its infinitude so inconceivable by the human mind that it may as well lie in the realm of the unattainable. The present analysis of writing must therefor focus on the (2) world of Creation as the first performance of the writing activity we may scrutinize.

Creation is unique because, as Attridge acknowledges, “there are times when … I am not putting into words a conceptual structure I have already planned, not tinkering with an existing text to make it more accurately express what I want it to say, not working out a problem according to a preexisting set of rules (17).” This is to say that when the writing persona is not dealing with phenomena that has already entered the world of Expression (or, refashioning the already formed), but siphoning from a Yet-Unmanifest plane the germs of a new form, then they are creating. “I seem to be composing new sentences out of nothing [italics mine],” he says, acknowledging the holy No Thing which is the womb of human creation and expression, that body from which all our bodies and all our ideas have sprung. Going on, he says, “from time to time the nebulous outlines take shape …” noting the way that the diffuse of the essence of human ideas are formed, or shaped, somewhat crudely, from the ethereal, non-physical melange of material Origination (or, as he calls it, “the largely inchoate swirl of half-formulated thoughts and faint intimations” [which is how the world of Origination appears to the human psyche]) (and he enforces, as well, the cosmic allegory, emphasizing the way that the diffuse of the nebula collapses, after enough mass [content] and gravity [unity] have been applied, into a star: a more condensed unit of literary “light”) (17). In this process he find himself always losing his thread, deleting, and going back over his process of writing to say “what needs to be said,” or, he corrects himself, what “demands to be said (17, italics his).” Here he admits that he is but compelled by the Absolute Being of the Womb to write out (use his body as a vessel for manifesting) her essence (universal ideals) in a new unique form (the product of the text). “Motivated by some obscure drive, I sense that I am pushing at the limits of what I have hitherto been able to think,” he finishes his paragraph, and in this conclusion we see that he has risen up the hierarchy of the literary phenomenon, having moved beyond the mere regurgitation of preformed or reacted phenomena, past the making of sentences, past the idea of what it is he is writing, past any concrete conception what he wants to convey, and has hit the ceiling of the Yet-Unmanifest, the limit of his manifested thought, beyond which remains hitherto unthought. Attridge is not writing criticism in this paragraph. For one, he is writing a personal-philosophic reflection and, secondly, it is a spiritual speculation above all else.

Attridge acknowledges shortly after the above discussion that “what I am trying to shed light on is not at bottom a matter of psychology, consciousness, or subjective experience, but of structural relations (18).” Oh, oh, oh. What Attridge describes as an “attempt at introspection” is not merely so: it is in fact the literature he wishes to critique, and now, unfortunately, he moves into a more disciplined criticism wherein he remains in the world of Expression—the lowest realm in the hierarchy—wherein he responds to the previously thought instead of the exciting world of the hitherto unthought. But, then again, one cannot be employed by an academic institution and expect to maintain a salary writing about that which cannot be proven by the populous; the Esteemed Critic must guard his essentially spiritual and personal quandaries in the veils of discipline, and support himself upon a foundation of tradition and rigor, lest the work of literary theory be confused with that of psychology or theosophy—how horrific—so different they are! So sad, as well. I wish that we could remain in the realm closer to the Unmanifest, as that is where I am from, that is where my heart is, and all the implication we see here on earth, in the Kingdom, have their roots above, in the ethereal Unmanifest noumenal nebula of all descendant phenomena.