Skill and Channeling

Writing is at the lowest level of skills, which is often a method of swimming downstream against the currents of Being in time, passing through the “present” and revealing what has been lost; channeling the spirit of the future into the present body. Therefore, I often feel that writing courses which exclude the teaching of writing skills and rhetoric are a dangerous, yet necessary journey. Because you never really know your students who are joining you on the journey—who are they? What kind of convictions do they have (or not have)? What kind of “self” are they bringing with them to join you? You do not know, in such a voyage approaching the earth’s horizon, who will be cast away by the centrifugal force of the parabolic line, never to return, becoming a broken person who is truly humiliated and insulted. I believe that writing courses should be a concerted effort in these seemingly incongruous cases (content), through the ritual of repetitive discussion, to identify one’s only aesthetic possibility (form) and to give expression through the process of “language-ization.” This ritual is extremely difficult to characterize as a particular model. I think, however, it is most similar to a theater stage, a field fixed in time that is constructed every week (like a psychologist’s consultation room) and is based on a received script called “WRITING,” summoning something and puncturing something.