Keith Maillard and I recently were discussing the process of editing and somehow we arrived at a point in the conversation where we talked about the notion of truth, and just how much is too much or two little to say. In the middle of that tributary he said, “If the truth I told in a manuscript included “everything”, you wouldn’t want to read it”. I quite liked that statement, and later we exchanged the following emails.

I began by saying, “It says something about the notion of too much truth being too much to absorb, bear, or to be of interest. Maybe we instinctively know ‘everything’ is no longer the truth, or rather is a truth that has no meaning or relevance in our lives. In a sense a truth that has become ‘everything’ is no longer the kind of truth we’re looking for or that satisfies us. It seems the whole truth isn’t whole at all, but is made up of a selection of parts from the whole where together their sum has become greater than the whole. The truth we humans are interested in is always the one that has been focussed and interpreted, which brings me to the act of selecting/editing from ‘everything’.

“I don’t think the notion of making selections (the absolute tyranny of choice) makes something less true; what it does change is the perspective we have of the truth. Selection doesn’t diminish truth, but gives it a stronger face and focus. It doesn’t take us further from the truth, but closer. Think of it like the sculptor’s block of granite that gradually is chiselled into the truth of its particular being. In this sense, the silence of saying/writing nothing is an extreme at the opposite end of ‘everything’, both of which convey nothing of themselves, or of truth, being too little or too much of a truth we struggle so hard to apprehend.”

In response, Keith wrote, “If I told you ‘everything’, you wouldn’t want to read that story because it would be thousands of pages long and you would be drowned in the details of mundane life. In order to tell you something you might want to read, I have to select a smaller amount of what to tell you. Each time I make a selection, it becomes more readable and less true–although it’s still all ‘the truth’. By the time I have it boiled down to something that resembles a publishable book, it’s far far from the original ‘truth’ – even though it is all still true. I don’t see any way to avoid this. It just seem to be a simple fact of the writing process.

“The selection is exactly that–a selection. The selection process has to try for a kind of truth too, but all the untold stories hang around afterward, like ghostly presences in the background, saying, ‘Hey, buddy, don’t forget us. We’re just as true as the stuff you told’. Making the selection is one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done in my life. That shorter pattern has to make its own truth, and it has to feel true enough that you’re willing to live with it. We do this all the time whether we write it down or not. We all continually narrate the stories of our own lives. The truth is the pattern that we make on any given day just to stay alive.”

Edward Carson & Keith Maillard

The digital world is full of educational experiences. People who wish to learn can now much more easily acquire a lot of the skills and knowledge they need in order to effectively translate what they’ve learned into practical workplace applications as well as pleasing educational or creative experiences.

Who among us as writers, or students or the merely curious have not followed a trail of thinking through the internet’s wealth of websites, definitions, essays, images, references and other sources of information? Look at the number of photographers who have found in the digital world new access and control over their art. Music will never be the same, though literally now it can be. TV, movies, radio, books and computer programs are converging, while HD is morphing into 3-D. The ease of access to much of this is improving daily, as is the range of subject matter and expertise, all of which just about anyone can acquire without the benefit of a set of instructions, a school room or university, books, a guide or an instructor.

As someone with several years experience in writing, publishing, photography, editing, management and education, I recognize the creative kinship among many of these fields, and the role the digital world has played in each. In particular, my role as an educator makes me wonder about whether education now needs to be understood and practiced in an entirely different way.

With this digital world as an alternative source of just about any information and knowledge, we as creators and educators need to prove our worth to students every day. So, in this emerging digital world, what does a student need most from an instructor or educational provider?

The first thing we have to realize is that the old and new educational worlds are light years apart in their cultures. The classroom setting is an environment where the teacher-to-student delivery method is linear in nature, whereas the digital is decidedly nonlinear, even metaphoric in the way it presents alternatives the student can explore. The two processes are distinct, clearly impacting how someone learns, the paths of learning they take, and, in fact, the kind of knowledge they emerge with from the other end. The classroom is heavy on guided thought, sometimes featuring mentoring, nurturing, one-on-one relationships. The digital setting relies more on independent thought and exploration, and relies more on number and data driven solutions or experiences which are a direct result of the design structures and meta-data algorithms of search engines.

Traditional educators tend to think of themselves as providers (keepers) of knowledge, content and skills, whereas perhaps our new role has less to do with merely providing information. Perhaps it is more along the lines of knowledgeable guide, mentor, coordinator. We need to create environments where we help students coordinate together in combining and making sense of the knowledge and information. The best education always seems to come in groups, where people learn from each other in an incremental map of discovery followed by application.

The educational experience needs to swing equally between information gathering and what to do with it. In a way, both the classroom and the internet are ideal environments for this, and so the much discussed hybrid version of education (some classroom time/ some online) seems to be the right direction. The goal would be to accelerate both the range and pace of learning in communities of learners. When people feel a connect to what they are a part of, then you get a whole different set of behaviors and learning outcomes. Add to this a student group version of a social network, and you have the makings of a powerful engine of interactivity that can self-organize, share information, and support the growth, development and progress of the group.

I believe that a poem knows where it’s going, often before I do, and well before it has arrived fully formed with its journey complete. There’s nothing particularly mystical about this; it merely reflects the notion that communications in all forms are shared and shaped as much by the nature and flow of the language we use as they are by the form and content we wish to impart.

Language, and poetry in particular, is always hard at work solving the complex problem of coordinating the paths and meanings of its form and content. Its words are like pedestrians on a crowded and busy sidewalk; the nature of their flow determines the path of thoughts and ideas which in turn alter the nature and direction of the whole. This “self-coordination” has a special kind of beauty for the writer because the language seems to both self-organize as well as respond to whatever control the writer exerts in community with the flow of the language. Somehow this partnership works, at least often enough to make the writerly solutions it produces worth doing

The power of language is that it connects us with each other, and creates communities of ourselves with the outside world; in that sense it is a medium informing our sense of what is real in the world by provoking a comparison to the literature it evokes and inhabits. This is one of the great illusions as well as mysteries of art as a whole, that it makes us bear witness to the similarities that are borne out of inherent differences between what we see and what we make, what we wish to say and how it actually emerges.

 

Portrait in a Room

The absence is in the place someone leaves
behind, departing the room without so much

as another word, an unlikely place to be thinking
someone might be searching for something else

entirely. It is the feeling left behind, the feeling
of a certain way of knowing what works best

and what might take its place. If there is a word
for it, it must be the promise of what is no longer

there to see or know, the promise of a promise
not to be what we hoped or longed for, not to be

left alone in a room, but the promise of that solitary
hour when you spoke softly, slowly of everything.