Ecstasy of Glass and Grain
In "The Crystal Goblet", typographer Beatrice Ward puts forth the image of a wine connoisseur choosing between two vessels for their drink. One is a flagon made of gold-- ornate and brilliant, expensive and decadent. It basks in its own materiality, celebrates the fact that it is made of gems and bas-relief, atoms interacting. The other is clear glass-- invisible, functional, a window into the wine itself. If it were physically possible it would not be made of any material at all. Which do you choose?
Alternately, pretend you have a supply of wood and are deciding how to sell it. At one extreme, you can focus on the unique qualities of each individual log, developing and circulating a "poetics of wood" to reason about the differences between logs. At the other, you might refine each piece into identical planks, reducing the differences of their grain as much as possible so that they can better communicate the shape and form of a house. Which do you choose?
These dichotomies are our intuition behind a fundamental choice related to texts. Are words a dissipating medium for ideas, or are they the ideas themselves? You must choose, and carefully.
Some text is meant to fade away into its own summary. A newspaper writer documents a pop star's meteoric rise as digestibly as possible; a textbook attempts to explain the intuitions behind "sine" so that a student doesn't trip over their audiation of the text. The text is read, and if read well, the reader is left with a pure and precious fact. Like the glass goblet that would like to become invisible for the wine, we'll call this text glassy.
Some text is meant to linger, unsummarizable. A poet collages together pleasing sounds, ignoring their meaning. An academic develops an acronym for pedagogical use, using the coincidences of language to make their idea more memorable. The text does not dissipate; any foray into it to derive an image is temporary. The thing being communicated is bound up in the sibilance of "s", rather than the meaning it carries in conjunction with other sounds. Like the whole wood-- and after Barthes, who used the same wood metaphor to describe voice-- we'll call this text grainy.
A single word (or other text atom) cannot be both glassy and grainy, but a text certainly can. A comedian talks in a conversational style, with a voice so clear and pleasant that it's barely legible as a voice. The details of his accent, the actual action of his lungs, all these material facts that Barthes called geno-song fade to the back of the listener's mind, leaving only the meanings of his words, the emotion of them, the image behind them. His language is glassy. But then, he reveals it: all along his story was a front to set up an absurd pun. The physicality of language fades back in; the listener is made aware of the comedian's accent, can almost imagine how the cells in his throat allow the straddling of lines between vowels. We are being given a gift, a space to notice some absurd coincidence of the language we speak-- why not bask in it a little? Why not, as the comedian, wander into the hissing forest of possible "s"-sounds and pick the most pleasing one? His language becomes grainy.
It is absurd to believe that either extreme of this spectrum exists. Nevertheless, you must. You must earnestly believe that you can write so simply and clearly that the ink itself will disappear from the page, or form a string of words so baroque that their signified vanishes from the earth. Not only does this make beautiful text, it is pleasing to write. There's a spiritual pleasure to it, making glass more clear and grain more opaque, peering into an abyss and deciding whether to represent it as atoms or ideas. It is an altered consciousness-- an ecstasy.
For the secret is that glassy and grainy are actually within the reader. Our conception that text has glassiness or graininess was an abstraction, a trick of the light-- hence the mystical quality. Indeed, your mind is plastic enough to make text completely glassy, or completely grainy. You read a newspaper article in a glassy way only because the occasion (that is, the fact that the writing appeared in a newspaper) suggested you should-- and because the writing, to its credit, encouraged it. The writing did not enable this mode of analysis. It used an invisible rhetoric (precision, simplicity, a sense of authorlessness) that signaled that the writer's mind is on ideas rather than forms. Read me how you want, says the article, I cannot stop you-- but if you're here in an attempt to understand something another being is trying to communicate, you had best read me in a glassy way.
For this reason, entering this altered consciousness requires something objectionable: the teleological suspension of the reader. That is, you must pretend for a moment that the reader (the site of meaning generation, the reason you are writing!) does not exist, that the only measure of glass and grain is within the text. Of course, outside of this ecstasy, you might be well served to ask "What background, relationship to my language, worldview, identity is necessary to see it as I do?" and indeed revise accordingly. But inside the ecstasy of glass and grain, you must close your eyes and put your full attention onto the process that you, when reading, perform without thinking, where the text alters you and you alter it back. You must enter a darkness where the only Other is the text.
Earlier I claimed a single word should not be both glassy and grainy. Why is this? Because language is like any other beautiful tool! A master chef has two principal modes of relation to a knife they've used for decades. There is a mode of prosthesis, where the knife becomes entirely an extension of their body, and its status as an object fades. The chef's "glassy" conception of their knife is a set of verbs related to its use, a set of possible worlds where the knife is used to cut. Alternately, there is a mode of full attention to the knife, an awareness of its "grainy" material nature. Here the chef is not abstracting its atoms into verbs, but considering how those atoms react to forces like gravity and grip, not bundling those states into groups based on words like "mince" or "rocking motion".
These are precisely the modes of relation a reader might have to words. My opposition to a word being both grainy and glossy is not about duplicity, impurity, or any such hogwash. Such a word is merely an unfamiliar tool. A novice chef using an unfamiliar knife is at all times vigilant, eternally treating it as an object demanding awareness (an awareness which they haven't honed) and simultaneously as a body part (a part which feels foreign to them). They are unable to devote sufficient attention to any particular mode-- and the understanding of what to pay attention to is behind competence itself.
Fear not, we tell the novice. You will understand your tool's natures soon. Just use it.
Thanks to Euphemia for criticizing a first draft of this essay.