Monday, September 16, 2013

iUniverse author John C. Woodcock’s insights on writing: Part 4

In the next part of this blog series iUniverse author John C. Woodcock continues to conceptualize his writing for us.

Memories Dreams Reflections“This conception helped as I began to understand that the nature of my writing involved, not any genre or established craft, but a breakdown of such categories, and indeed, a breakdown of fundamental categories such as mechanical space and linear past, present, and future, those very categories that constitute the background of our stabilized modern structure of consciousness. This early formulation helped to distinguish what I had believed was merely a personal breakdown from an objective breakdown of categories occurring “in the background” of modern consciousness. This real process at present has no category with which to name and therefore grasp it, since it involves a breakdown in categories. I could use names like “fictive”, or “imaginative”, but these categories come loaded with a history that has deprived them of any truth or reality. In fact these words currently mean the opposite—not real, fantasy, entertainment only, falsity, etc.

But the phenomenology is conclusive. This process is real and has no referent outside itself. For example a breakdown of categories does not refer outside itself to a literal break down on a personal level or to the scale of a literal world catastrophe, although many people who are caught up in these background movements often make these misinterpretations. And yet, because this movement is the real background or the “within-ness” of the world, then it follows that madness or world catastrophe are not to be excluded after all.

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