Ars Prosaica - Am I a Liar? Authorial Voice and Word Responsibility
(Thoughts on writing and reception from talking with SO)

I feel it necessary to discuss my own theory of the writing, in order to explain how it is I write, what sort of voice I am writing in, and to what extent what I write is "true or "truthful".

I realized a while back that what I write is not really truth, in the sense that I'm not interested in accurately capturing or recording merely the empircal facts of my existence - as would a video camera, but with words. Im interested detail in neither the cereal I ate for breakfast nor the type of milk I put on top of it, nor even wish to describe my work outfit on a given day and what sort of weather I experienced as I drove to work.

Rather, I write to explore what Milan Kundera expressed in his excellent book, Art of the Novel, as 'possibilties of being.' Attempting to record in detail the verifiable facts of my existence means nothing really unless these details are tied together with or are the expression of a mode or way of being in the world. All these details of what I do and who I am are only meaningful if they express or convey the meaning of who I am as a person, a being in the word - a Self. Whether or not this Self that becomes represented through my writing actually records what I have factually experienced is irrelevant: the self expressed in the writing has an existence apart from me the author. This self is liberated from my own living and breating and dying corporeal being and takes on a life and existence of its own.

These ontological possibilities of this new, word-based self (and whatever details and facts I wish to assign to it) represents an immense freedom for me as the author, the creator, the vates who sacrifices the meaning of his own existence, his own self, and in the process creates a new being from the wreckage and pieces of his own discarded mask of self. The reader may be looking forautobiographical signs of me, Patrick Nolan, in the littering of broken shards and pieces and slivers of the flesh person they know in real life, but the even this literary self could not come close to capturing all the buzzing and blooming collection of thoughts, experiences, actions, and emotions that may be happening at any given time to me, with me, by me, around me, etc.

What is immensely liberating on one hand is that I have learned I can write about anything, approach uncomfortable, distressing, even ghoulish thoughts, sad ideas, dejected and desolate feelings, ideas, possiblities of being, without the worry that I actually have to own any of these ideas and words, nor do I have to believe they represent me or capture who I am. I often will write to understand what I have experienced, felt, thought, read, and wish to understand them to a depth to fully know them all. Partly the way I achieve this is by pretending or writing as if I really believed them, or, as the voice of the person speaking really believed these ideas, and is perhaps oppressed or affected by them. In other words, I fully allow for a persona to inhabit the voice of my writing, to write as with another voice that is speaking actually subjectively, to enable a full expression of the idea and the concepts, the feelings, the expression of being. The character wearing a mask begins to take a life and speak. I am merely the channeller.

So, all the words and snippets on this blog in many cases are explorations of self, of many possible and potential selves created through my words and my fingers as they type these keys, but these Selves are not me - or they are not all of me. They are only an expression of me: characters, voices, personas, poor players that may eventually get the chance to fret strut their hour upon the stage of a story or a poem, or a dramatic monolgue - one of my favorite forms of writing. Indeed, if I have an ars prosaica or poetica, it is that all of my speakings, at least in writing in this forum, is an exercise of a self in the act of becoming, voice development, character creation - it is a fiction, as much the self and personality we develop too is itself, I believe, a necessary fiction that plays a part in the ever developing human drama we all inhabit.

Am I responsible for my words? I have to say, despite the fact I am attempting in most writings to express and capture and develop a person as a means of exploring possibilities of being, people can be affected by these words, moved perhaps troubled, hopefully enlightened. So I am responsible. But, this is not newswriting, nor is it philosophy or science - my writing is attempting and learning and discovering my own and all other forms of human consicousness, art, feeling, love, expession - in other words, what some call Being.