Ode to the Books Unwritten
Last year, about this time, I was reading Jason Guriel’s On Browsing and so when I was recently in Audreys Books I saw On Book Banning by Ira Wells from the same Biblioaisis series, Field Notes and immediately picked it up. Couldn’t have come at a better time. You might have heard about my province’s desire to ban books in public libraries? Happily the Coalition of Alberta Public Libraries is here to keep us informed.
Book censorship is never about protecting the children from profanity — if they wanted to do that they’d be focusing on the internet right? The idea is to get us all to stop thinking, reading quality material, having ideas of our own. The harms are various and many. One of those harms is that it affects future ideas, future books. As Ira Wells says, on a historical moment of censorship, that it “wrought unfathomable harm on human creativity over the course of centuries. One can only speculate about the books that weren’t written, the discoveries that weren’t disseminated, the artists and thinkers who censored themselves and deprived history of what might have been.”
As an aside, this is a great time to support small press publishers where a lot of writers such as myself are given a voice. They are also being squeezed and so we can already see a future where writers write less because there’s nowhere to publish unless you’re writing something extremely marketable.
I can’t help thinking that this current moment of book banning coupled with the advent of degenerative AI written slopbooks — that this is a pivotal moment in the history of creativity and reading. (Book banning has been happening in a lot of places, not just where I live, and odds are it’s a trend that’s not going to stop while we have authoritarian-inspired leaders). I know you know all this. Also, it comes at a time when folks are reading less than ever. Wells quotes the survey that says about “half of Americans didn’t read a single book in 2023.”
Censors don’t like that literature is complex, that it is, as Wells says, “irreducible.” Also, it inspires. It inspires thinking about things from multiple perspectives, and it inspires new ideas, new ways of becoming, of being. Literature helps us form our own personal ethics and integrity and identity. Writing is thinking. A creative practice is a way of thinking things through.
I’ve once again been reading Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury which is really a great novel to re-read at this time. In a passage where Beatty describes to Montagu how all the book burning started, how before “the world was roomy” but then people became simpler at the mass level. “Films and radios, magazines, books lowered down to a sort of paste pudding norm, do you follow me?” Montague says that “Nobody listens any more.” He says, “We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren’t happy. Somethings’s missing.” (Which is what happens when everything has been reduced to paste pudding). What is threatening though are the ideas in books. And Faber helps him understand what he’s missing: “Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality…..the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more ‘literary’ you are. That’s my definition, anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often.”
Good books are nourishing, they are delicious! While the endless scroll contains so many empty calories.
I think about how for me these days it’s just incrementally harder to get to the page. I’ve spent more time scrolling than browsing. More time sifting than deep reading. We could be problem solving, connecting in real life, figuring things out together, thinking things through and with, but instead our minds and our creativity are being lost to the doomscroll which is the intended outcome as designed by the billionaire bros.
I save articles about degenAI a lot in my bookmarks. Here’s one. But also, I think about the sheer amount of time I have spent raging against that crumby machine when I could have been writing or doing something creative.
So: new topic. Sorry to lead you back to IG but I loved the words by Artemis II astronaut Jeremy Hansen on integrity.
I guess we’ve all been thinking more about the moon of late, and so here is a poem by Lalla translated by the late Coleman Barks:
The soul, like the moon
The soul, like the moon,
is new, and always new again.
And I have seen the ocean
continuously creating.
Since I scoured my mind
and my body, I too, Lalla,
am new, each moment new.
My teacher told me one thing,
Live in the soul.
When that was so,
I began to go naked,
and dance.
The above poem is from The Soul is Here For Its Own Joy. And just a quick browse through my dogeared pages surfaces a few other lines to leave you with:
From Attar:
“Keep quiet and secret with soul-work.”
“Be more deeply courageous.
Change your soul.”
Rilke:
Whoever grasps the thousand contradictions of [their] life,
pulls them together into a single image, that [hu]mans, joyful
and thankful drive the rioters out of the palace,
become celebratory in a different way, and you are the guest
who is received on the quiet evenings.
(I took some liberties in revising man to humans etc here…)
