Writing Abstracts the Embodied Concrete
Claire Messud:
We were embodied, animals still and always; our words emanated, became separate from us – wasn’t this precisely the magic of writing, to send a construct of words into the world, to share the abstract as if it were, as if it had been made, real, had become a concrete experience, the way a composer and orchestra created music or an architect and builders a tower? Only in the case of stories, expressly to be translated into the minds of others, de-concretized, made portable, so that we might all share (and yet individually create) an experience as real as if it had been lived … this was communication, my religion’s communion, the sharing impossible when tribalism held sway (whether of the Catholics at mass or of the ayatolla and his fatwa), a secular and necessarily open-minded sharing in which the self was subsumed in the invention, in which metaphor and irreality were understood as if – a reality that wasn’t real, the tension of it delicious and vital. But it, too, relied on a sophisticated contract, a pact with abstraction.
This Strange Eventful History, pp. 320f