Essay: The Thomist Page

I feel like I felt on May 20th 1974 when I got a lift from my father’s friend Hubert and travelled 23 miles west from my hometown to start my first job as a railway clerk in the Goods Office of Claremorris station in the westernmost county of Ireland. Standing in that tiny office, the Chief Clerk told me that part of my job would be to keep the pot-bellied stove stoked in cold weather, which turned out not to be a joke. There is no stove where I write now, but I have the same nervousness, fear of the new.

It feels like a different way of communicating, of writing, maybe of thinking, and that’s something I shall strive to avoid. I wish to write here as though on paper. I once foolishly described myself as a Luddite, because I have a policy of only learning about technology to the precise extent I need to know about it to do something particular that cannot be done otherwise. This led to me being described, online and in the real world, as a ‘self-confessed Luddite’, as though Luddism were like strangling or highway robbery.

Actually, I am not quite a Luddite. I do email, have dabbled on YouTube, wear an Apple watch (for step-counting) and even briefly had a Twitter account when I ran earlier this year for election to the Dáil, the lower house of the Irish parliament. I ran as an independent in the constituency of Dun Laoghaire, where I have lived for 30 years, and got about 800 votes, which I prefer to think of as a beautiful village in the West of Ireland and which I shall spend the rest of my life trying to locate. I didn’t post anything for months afterwards but Twitter still appears to have banned me for life in abstentia, because that’s what they do. I’m very happy about this, by the way: I have a theory that, in half a century or so, if the world is still in a fit state to examine anything, a team of anthropologists, archaeologists and such may be charged with finding the cause of the collapse of Western civilisation in the opening years of the third millennium and, after poking around in the residual entrails of said civilisation, will emerge holding up a piece of dog-eared papyrus, bearing a single word of explanation: ‘Twitter’.

So, though Substack is self-evidently an online phenomenon, I don’t propose to approach it like that. I am determined that everything I shall publish here will be rooted not just in the real world but in the old real world, the one we are currently in the process of destroying. I would therefore like readers to think of themselves as reading not from a screen, but from a page, or even better, a pristine sheet of papyrus. Let me try to explain.

I have a theory that most writers don’t write for people at all, but for something inanimate, inert and apolitical: precisely, the Page. 

 The Page has been the larynx, talisman of collective human seeking for liberty for thousands of years, and the very cornerstone of democracy for a much shorter time. To the extent that we have already lost these hard-won things, it is because of our abandonment of the page as emblem and instrument of the relationship between thought and freedom. The Page is where that connection has been forged — and renewed on a daily basis for at least two millennia.

It has long been my belief that there’s a profound difference between writing for a Page and writing on a screen for an audience that reads this as though on the other side, a bit like a two way mirror.

A writer — for all that he or she may write for a ‘market’ or an ‘audience’ — is really writing for him or herself, to learn through objectification what he or she believes and to project this on to a blank surface where it may become improved before being preserved and promulgated. This process has led to the creation of the freest and most advanced civilisation the world has ever seen. There are other elements also, of course, not least the Christian one, but I will return to that at another time.

The Page is the Platonic wall on to which the shadows of reality are projected by the flames of the fire that rages behind them, the fire of desire and hoping, the fire of fear and loathing. The writer is the servant of this alchemy, no more.

The relationship between Page and author is open, intimate, curious, listening, tolerant but also, paradoxically, judgmental. Paper never refuses ink, but it is a harsh but silent critic of what is scratched upon it. Writing is thinking written down, but it is also something else — the silent Page answering back by holding up the half-crystallised thought in all its inadequacy and demanding that it be revised, improved. The Page is a kind of mirror of the writer’s thoughts, enabling them to be examined and improved, like make-up, I suppose. It encourages introspection, extends a sense of intimacy that lends to the optimisation of truthfulness. 

It is said that the great Christian philosopher Thomas Aquinas, believing that the path to truth was best walked in dialogue, would treat the ideas of his challengers and adversaries as though they were the most shimmering things he had ever heard, then politely refine them into pure truth, without giving offence. As Josef Pieper observed, he challenged opponents not at the weakest points in their positions but in the area of their strongest arguments, frequently presenting their views much better than they had themselves. The Page does this, too, subjecting the limitations of your own thought-processes to a scrutiny that could occur within the skulls of only the best-trained thinkers. With a few deft tweaks, what started as arrant nonsense becomes something slightly better. The Page is Thomist in its rigour and in its ultimate judgements.

 The Screen is alienating, as between audience and ‘performer’. One of the synonyms of screen is ‘display’, but others are ‘partition’, ‘divider’, ‘separator’. Another still is ‘blind’. To screen something is to conceal, hide, mask, shield, shelter, shade, protect, veil, cloak, camouflage, disguise, all qualities antithetical to the ethics of literature. The Page allows you to whisper or scream, but you can only yell or shoot towards a Screen. Everything is directed as though to a participating audience, seen through crosshairs. The Screen is for posing, shape-throwing, drawing from the user mostly venom and sarcasm. 

Writing for the Page supports freedom; writing for Screens takes it away. Just as a calculator steals your ability to calculate, so writing on a Screen steals your literacy and your courage. Such writing, if such it be, exists to be scanned, not read. 

It is possible to write on a Screen and avoid these traps only by regarding your Screen as if it were a Page, eliminating the idea of an anonymous but like-minded audience and instead imagining that everything you write is addressed to Thomas Aquinas. That is how I try to write, especially on to a Screen. It is not an easy trick. It is not a trick.

In my missives here, I shall try to forge a path into the future around the impediments put in front of us to force us forward in a singular direction. This is to say that I shall be showing a clean pair of heels to the totalitarian idea, and also, in the other direction, rebuilding the bridge of memory so that we may measure our progress, and our ethic of progressiveness, more accurately by reference to the past.

What am I going to be writing about? Anything, though not everything. Life, death, ideology, Godstuff, relationships of almost every kind, history, politics, work, heroes, villains, education, what we call culture — and Covid, which increasingly reveals itself as a kind of shorthand in the foreseeable future for all of the above. Probably I won’t be writing much about sport, fashion or lifestyles, but I never say never.

I’ll be posting stuff irregularly for a start but am hoping in short order to be publishing two or three essays, articles or bulletins per week. There’s a difference between an essay and an article, though I’m not certain what it is. I added 'bulletin' there just to make up a troika of nouns, don't ask me why. The word ‘piece’ has in recent times, journalistically speaking, supplanted both 'essay' and 'article', but I loathe that word used in that context almost as much as I have come to loathe the word ‘journalism’ in almost any context, for ‘piece’ suggests a brief, partial, thrown-together screed, missing either a beginning or an end or both.

I’ll be putting up some stuff from various past writings of my own that may become relevant as we go along, as well as some sense of my books, past and future, as soon as I get a chance to put some shelves around here.

I’ll also be posting the odd link to things of mine published elsewhere, things by other writers that catch my fancy or leave me speechless with envy, and maybe the odd song or poem that cuts to the chase in a way that leaves prose gasping for breath. I may also — very occasionally, I promise — post one of my own songs, but solely for the purpose of making a point I cannot make otherwise. For this and other reasons, I shall not be affording readers the opportunity to respond to my content in a public forum managed by me. What people do elsewhere is their own business. Do your worst.

The style won’t generally be like this present offering, whatever we may characterise that. The style of the essay naturally tends towards portentousness, and who am I to start a new trend? Articles tend to be short, informal but informative. I shall try my hand at both.

There is another category, to which this present composition may well belong: the ‘burst of whimsy’ which is easy to write if you’re in the mood, and even easier to read, though not invariably. I tend to switch between all three, sometimes within the same sentence.

For the reader, there’s a concomitant process. Most readers of books, and anything but the most perfunctory of news reports, do not read purely for information, but to be transported to the places to which you can only be brought by words.

Words, if used properly, aspire to the condition of magic. I don’t always meet that standard, but that is part of my ambition every time I sit down in front of the blank Page to conjure up new sentences and, hopefully, sense. Let's see.