A Writer went out to Write

In about 1888, Vincent van Gogh painted a picture with a difference. It was called Self-Portrait as a Painter.* He didn’t just paint himself sitting or standing; he painted himself painting himself. The action he was doing was itself the subject: it was a mirror event; a reflexive or recursive activity.

The Selfie: photographing oneself photographing oneself...

Self-portraiture is one of a fairly limited set of things that can be done recursively. You can carve a carving of a carver carving. You could (I suppose) make a cake in the shape of a person baking. More usefully, if you were a blacksmith you could use your forge to make an instrument used in the forge. Among the things created on the first Sabbath eve, the ancient Rabbis listed ‘the tongs made with tongs’. It was an acknowledgement of the philosophical problem of recursiveness in the context of manufacturing: if to make tongs you need tongs, how were the first tongs made?

But there is one realm in which recursiveness really has a field day: language, and everything done with language. Everyone, not just the linguistic scholar, uses words to discuss words. Often there is an ironic recursiveness in our assertions about language: ‘I’d like to totally stamp out the split infinitive’, for example. But a more specific, and, one hopes, constructive, recursiveness takes place here on this More Than Writers blog, where we write, exclusively, about writing.

Having made that blanket statement, though, I must allow that there are some limitations to our recursiveness. We don't post novels about struggling or successful novelists and their work — they’d be too long, of course; nor do we post short stories about short story writers. We don’t post sonnets about the work of sonneteers, or hymns about hymn writers. I don’t think we even post devotional pieces about devotional writing.

No, we basically use the non-fictional prose essay format whether we are discussing fiction, poetry, hymnography, or plain non-fictional prose writing. Whatever our creative flight pattern is like in our day-job writing, in this blog we subject ourselves to the self-denying ordinance of sober essay format. This is perhaps one among several reasons why crafting a really good and appropriate post for More Than Writers is a challenging undertaking. We put on the plain buff-coat of transparent prose. We stick to the strait and narrow pathway of Being a Writer. We tread cautiously between the chained-up lions of Spirituality and Politics.

In all this self-reflectivity, however, we actually have a divine precedent. To explain: as Christian writers, we quite often treat the parables of Christ as a touchstone. We see them as models of succinct and subtle storytelling, as well as impressive vehicles of profound teaching. We marvel that many of them give us an insight into God’s nature without even mentioning his name. 

Each parable is, of course, ‘about’ some aspect of the Kingdom: staying spiritually awake, forgiving others as we have been forgiven, persisting in prayer, and so on. But there is one parable that is different, because it is only ‘about’ itself. The Parable of the Sower is a story which teaches or preaches about the process of teaching or preaching. Jesus never wrote about writing or anything else (except an undisclosed statement in the dust) but here he goes recursive, and gives teaching, in the form of a story, on the process of teaching and preaching.

How neat is that for More Than Writers? What can we learn from it? Perhaps, not to worry about the details of the distribution of our carefully crafted words? Or that the response of readers isn’t up to us to be concerned about? Or that three-quarters of the audience will fail to respond in the way we would like? Or the immeasurable value of an answering chord in the one or two hearts that are touched? Any other ideas?

*You can see it here.

Edmund Weiner