Reading The Body Digital by Vanessa Chang

My morning reading book for the past several weeks has been The Body Digital, by Vanessa Chang. It’s a powerful book and I’m still integrating it into my own thinking.

Part of my practice is to copy some of the sentences that really strike me when reading. I do this rather than taking notes, though sometimes I add a few notes as well.

I’ve chosen a few that are related to writing to share here today. That will give you some flavor of the book, though it’s only a small part of what Chang is doing.

It can be easy to forget that writing is an embodied technology.

There are three powerful thoughts in those few words.

First of all, it’s easy to forget these things about writing because we take it for granted. We don’t think about it much, unless we’re sitting down to do some of it. It’s a fact of life in our world.

Secondly, it’s embodied – we use our bodies to do it. Now right now I’m writing on a keyboard, which is my preferred way to write, but even that requires physical movement.

Writing by hand requires other kinds of movement, and dictation to produce written words a third kind. All of those are physical.

Chang goes on to say:

While much of writing’s profound impact lies in its massive capacity to store and transmit ideas, its ancestry in handmade marks makes it the twin of drawing.

I’ll get to the first part of that in a minute, but the idea that writing is much like drawing – which preceded it – amplifies the fact that it’s an act of our bodies. I keep thinking about Japanese and Chinese writing and particularly about how people do calligraphy with words in those languages, creating their own understanding of the word through the way they do the lines.

Much of the traditional poetry in those languages is also done as art. It’s a physical act – you could dance it, really – but it also stirs the mind, makes you think about ideas.

Technology is the third concept in that first sentence. Writing is a technology. The second quote – “its massive capacity to store and transmit ideas” – makes that clear.

Before writing, communication involving words (rather than pictures) was oral, and while memorization was cultivated in many cultures to preserve what they considered important, words were generally fleeting and – importantly – only shared in person.

Writing changed that. Obviously later technology has changed it even more, but think about the fact that you can read something written thousands of years ago. And of course we regularly read work by people we will never meet in person or hear speak, even if they are still around.

(As someone who is always discovering incredible people by reading their obituaries, I really appreciate it that some of them were writers so that I can at least get to know them through that.)

Writing is technology, a tool humans designed for themselves. And like all such tools, it was controversial at first and it changed the way humans did things.

As someone who reads and thinks about what I read and then comes up with ideas on my own, I can’t imagine not wanting this technology of writing. I always want to build on what I read or hear. That’s a lot harder to do when your first task might be just to remember it. Or at least it seems that way to me.

Chang goes on to say:

Writing unmoors language from that present and transforms consciousness; by reifying the word, written language allowed us to see our thoughts separated from ourselves.

(The dictionary says that to reify means to represent something abstract as something material or concrete. I had a vague notion of what it meant, but I looked it up because I suspected there was more to it than I was getting. That turned out to be correct.)

Our thoughts separated from ourselves. As a writer, that makes a lot of sense. All these ideas are always pounding in my head, and I write them down to figure out what they all are. Then they become something separate, though often they aren’t exactly right.

(All the writers I know bemoan the fact that the story on the page is so often not as good as the vision of it in their mind before they start writing.)

Technologies like writing allow us to share thoughts and ideas as well as to clarify them for ourselves, but technologies are never a perfect conduit.

Here’s a final thought from Chang:

Writing has never been a solo act.

I’ll let you think about that one on your own.