20100715.2039

The amount of time I put into text--into reading it and into making it--is really more than sufficient. I know that it exceeds far the amount of time invested in text by any layperson, and that is as it should be, given that I seek to do text as a vocation.

I spend, as should be obvious, a fair bit of time considering my engagement with text--and that, too, is as it should be. Not reflecting on one's work is a sure path to error in that work.

I try, though without the degree of success I should like, to avoid error.

But as I consider the work I do, I encounter some thorny issues. One of them is the idea (which does exist among the greater body of my colleagues) that understanding a work of art--whatever the medium--is possible only for the trained critic.

In this attitude, my discipline betrays its origins among the monastic orders. It is similar, this attitude, to the notion that one can only know God by way of a dedicated priesthood.

I betray my Protestantism in saying that I find the notion objectionable.

There is nothing necessarily better about a critical understanding of a given piece of creative work than an untutored, intuitive one. And any who are willing to invest the effort into doing so can come to have a meaningful relationship with creative works or literature or art or anything else.

But.

Just as it is true that Protestant churches have clergy even though their doctrines call for each congregant to form a deep, abiding, individual relationship with the Most High, it is to the advantage of people to look to those who do give their lives over to the study of the creative or whatever for guidance in understanding it. For as with Protestant clergy, there are insights available to the dedicate scholar that are not so much so to the layperson.

This is only to be expected. In the so-called "practical" or "applied" arts, it is fully anticipated that a long-time practitioner will surpass in understanding the novice. Similarly, in the martial arts, one's senior students are expected to understand more than are junior students. But it must also be acknowledged that a beginning artisan can create a masterwork, and that an untutored, inexperienced brawler can lay low an old master.

Training does not create an exemption from error, just as its lack does not deny the possibility of either meaningful engagement or success. But as a rule, one who has labored long and trained intensely can be expected to contribute in a way that reflects the training, a way typically not expected from or provided by the inexperienced.

It is in the twin hopes of making such contributions and of being able to share them with others that I pursue this course of action, my years-long study of the written word.