A Note on Journalism
Let me make this clear to you before I begin: I do not particularly enjoy the limiting art that is journalism. (Please don’t stop reading). Let me explain myself. I have always found journalism to be rather stale, and pallid, and quite similar to the texture of old paste. That isn’t to say I haven’t tremendous respect and admiration for those who write “all the news that’s fit to print” every single day. It is an art (like all other writing), but until now I have tried to avoid this particular form at all costs, because I believe it is the most lowering of all forms of writing. Journalism has to be true (or at least an opinion of the world grounded in its own rules), thus I am not free to express myself outside the realm of reality. I feel diminutive— small. Why can’t I give my impression of a presidential election with a sonnet? Why can’t my response to a war be a story about lovers quarreling? People want the news; they want their coffee and their morning paper with “all the news that’s fit to print”, and therein, lies the issue: how I want to share my world is not fit to be printed in a newspaper. As a journalist, one is required to be concise not only in their number of words but in how efficiently one can’t get his or her view across. My problem. The facts aren’t there. My attempt at journalism would consequently fall short with the dubious title of ‘fiction’. I believe now would be the proper time to include a passage from one of my favorite works of ‘fiction’.
“The world isn’t just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no? Doesn’t that make life a story?” (Life of Pi 302)
My point exactly. How can we distinguish a line between what is journalism and what is fiction, if everything we observe and process is interpreted with even an ounce of bias, and thus becomes an alteration of the actual event? Even further, aren’t you, as the reader, going to take the words I’m sharing with you right now and make whatever you want out of them? Your impression of this very article might differ drastically from that of the person next to you. More likely, it will only differ slightly, but it will still differ. So, it can be argued that there is no such thing as absolute truth, because all experiences are deeply rooted in a sense of past experience and individual perception. Take colorblindness. What if someone who was colorblind saw grass as purple and the sky as green? How do we know that they aren’t seeing the world as it really is, and we are the ones that are colorblind?
I progress my argument for the rationale behind my gripe, but first, let me tell you a story.
A man decides he is going to climb a mountain. The preparations are tedious and grueling. He trains. The day comes when he is ready to begin his ascent. He goes it alone. With no other sound to comfort him but the ever-present trudge of his feet on uneaten, uncharted earth. The cold whips and whirls around him, stinging him with every step. He is so steadfast to reach the summit that he doesn’t pay any attention to his surroundings. He is immersed in it, sucked into a vortex, or black hole, or parallel universe, or brought back to a time when man didn’t exist. He has walked into another world. But he is watching his feet in front of him, so as not to trip on his way up. He doesn’t see it. It gets colder, and he puts on another layer to keep him warm. It doesn’t help him. The cold gets worse. The man is forced to stop and set up camp that night along the mountain. He tries to sleep, but the sound of silence all around him startles him, leaving him wary of an impending boom or shriek at any moment. It doesn’t come. Instead, the silence begins to lull him into a sort of blissful slumber; his eyes are still open. He gazes into the sheer vastness of the sky and stars and dreams. When morning falls on the mountain, the man gets up and heads back down the mountain. When the people in the nearby town ask him what happened, he tells them that while he was on the mountain he found God. No one believes him. They attribute his ‘hallucination’ to the altitude and the unnatural, blistering cold the night before.
Again, I refer back to my bible, my favorite book, for a passage that might bolster the point I’m trying to make.
“So tell me, since it makes no factual difference to you and you can’t prove the question either way, which story do you prefer?”
(Life of Pi 317)
So this is my problem with journalism: the matter of truth. If the world is a never-ending story and we are all characters in that story, then what is the purpose of journalism, and how does it differ in any way from fictional writing? It is only you who chooses what you do and do not read, what you do and do not see. So while you might say to yourself, “This guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” the person next to you might say, “I’ve just seen God.”
Various notes from a term paper of mine on postmodern literature
(THESE ARE FROM A PROJECT I'VE BEEN GRAPPLING WITH THE PAST MONTHS)
Language is perhaps the most integral component in literature; it is the building block from which all else stems. In this regard, language is continuously explored and stretched in modernism.
Jean-Francois Lyotard, a prominent postmodern literary critic, stated that recent historical events, especially the Holocaust, have pressured the rationalization of language.
Semiotics is about the rift between the signifier and the signified. What does this mean? There is a loss in translation that our brain compensates for in order for society and the status quo to remain in check. It means that we neglect the fact that we know that the name for a tree was simply just a part of this great machine that we fabricated in order to establish a meeting place to which we could all convene, and converse, and carry on livelihoods that allowed us to ascend to the top of the animal kingdom. What we left behind for the sake of the greater good was the fact that a tree is not necessarily a tree. Formalism is about excessive adherence to prescribed forms. And this was the norm so long as society continued to thrive. And this blissful ignorance worked up until a point. However it only worked because nobody smelt the coffee. There had always been destruction and loss of life, so it had always been expected to happen. And it would continue to happen. The failure of the war to end all wars, the atrocities of the Holocaust, this was not the status quo. People were literally rattled and had nothing to fall back on when such events befell the modern world. No longer would language prove to be the great efficient machine it had once been. The artifice of a ‘tree’ was no longer the comfort it had always been. It became insufficient due to an entire society’s inability to cope with disillusionment. Language was finally viewed through a truer lens: an artificial construct rather than an empirical truth. Where were words when the highest form of civilization was experiencing mass slaughter? People held their breath waiting for god to save them, but Nietzsche had already killed god. Quite simply, the imprecise nature of language was finally seen and society was left defenseless.
Language can provide no solace for those seeking refuge from a world that has left language as we once knew it obsolete. No one believed that anything like the Holocaust could happen to a civilization so advanced. People were so interested in keeping the order of the Stepford world they had so inadequately created, that their main aim was to appease Hitler to maintain the status quo. This lack of action spurred on evil of unspeakable value. Why this and not the horrors Genghis Khan unleashed on an entire region? Genghis Khan would be viewed by Western society as a barbarian, and thus his destruction would be explained through his identity. How then, could a modern European power attempt to wipe out an entire race of people? “There is a truth that all schoolchildren know; those who have evil done to them do evil in return.” Western society did not respond to the Nazi regime and Hitler with evil in return, but their lack of action is almost as evil as the systematic killing of eleven million. Their idling is monstrous in and of itself. It’s natural to blame those who did not speak out against such horrors, but then again how could you speak at all when words were no longer of any use? What is the proper response to the Holocaust? Nothing is appropriate. Explaining it poorly is certainly monstrous. Capturing the horror effectively is also monstrous, because it means that the events that occurred can be explained and quantified and are therefore not as terrible as they actually were. A lack of response is of course monstrous, and yet disregarding it altogether is horrific too. There is no proper response to such a situation, so where was there to go from here?
The 20th century tried to rid itself of the old ideals of the previous century. Necessities did not entail empires and colonization. The shaping of the modern world was the priority. However, this desire for restoration of order yielded unprecedented chaos. Such calamities yielded a lack of faith in all that was once held in high regard. Language was at the center of this crisis and underwent several experiments until society understood that attempts at putting the shattered world back together through any previous means was futile.
The romantics tried to elevate themselves from reality’s garbage by striving to embody the purity and beauty of nature. The modernists tried to strip away all of the garbage in order to find some sort of truth that would have otherwise gone unnoticed had the garbage not been removed. However both attempts at finding a sense of purpose beyond the ordinary and beyond the garbage fell short. The postmodernists believed that you can never escape the garbage. But they also believed that the garbage can be beautiful. And it is you who must adjust your perceptions and your prejudices in order to elevate yourself in a society teeming with the supposed filth and stench of garbage. Only if you can embrace the absurdity and irrationality can you embody art in its fullest potential.
It is difficult to analyze history through any lens other than absolute truth. However it is imperative that we never forget that this is not the case. History is malleable. Our impressions differ from generation to generation, and one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. The reason literature exists and has withstood the test of time is twofold: man’s insatiable craving for stories and the necessity to be remembered.
Like Poe’s raven, I feel like writing and literature is a perpetual grasp that just always falls short of holding and achieving. Nothing ever comes out as well as in one’s own imagination, and I feel, in part, that that is how it should be. The best ideas shouldn’t be scribbled down on paper to be interpreted and ogled by everyone else; they belong with you in the safest chambers of your heart. It is impossible to capture the magnitude of some emotions, and attempting to do so is just foolish. It’s about what the writer doesn’t say that is instilled in the reader that matters most. These are the life lessons that mold us into who we are as individuals and fulfilled human beings. Kleos is the Greek word for glory. It is a common theme in Homer’s epics The Iliad and The Odyssey. The Greek society placed the highest regard on an honorable death. One who has achieved kleos will have undoubtedly achieved immortality in the memory of others. The ultimate goal of writers is a more contemporary form of kleos. Those who write to be remembered aren’t necessarily selfish; they’re just coping with the notion of death. Those who do it for something else (and I believe those writers are partially full of it) do so to help others deal with death. Because that’s all literature is really; from the moment you are born, you are taught to postpone and deal with your death in any way possible. Because death does not wait for us at any moment, we cling to literature, because stories have a beginning, middle, and end. We are granted closure with life within a life, and we are satisfied. Where else are we granted this contentment? That is why immortality of print is humanity’s last laugh at perfection. By coping with our own innate fear of leaving this earth, we create something that stands the test of time, and lives forever. We can live our lives through stories and stories themselves can save us from our own mortality, but this cannot be a crutch we use like life support. It will only end up crippling us. All literature before the 20th century sought to find refuge in some grand truth that would elevate humanity from its own doom. The writers of the 20th century realized this truth: The truth about finding the magic that can elevate us, the words that can set us free from our earthly shackles— the truth that no such truth exists. It is this logic alone that can be our salvation. How we act on this truth defines who we are. We can choose to close the book and return to a blissful blindness, or we can live the story.
Thought Provoking
I certainly agree that journalism is an interpretation, to communicate an interpretation to another individual does not qualify the interpretation as absolute.
Our interpretation with finite experience is what we make of it. Our perception in any given situation is based on our interpretation of that experience.
And the mountain story reminds me of this: As conscious beings we perceive and identify with finite subjects of "reality"- in his case he identifies with walking, the weather, and the sounds - only in this case there is so little sound that his conscious does not have a sound to identify with, and perceives the infinite silence that is within every finite experience. The infinite source of all that is - god - the source of all finite creation.
I think the purpose of journalism is rooted in communication- what is the point of communication? I believe communication (not just human with human) is a shared interaction with 2 or more conscious beings in order to express a thought, feeling, or idea (all still interpretations of finite experience which is derived from the same infinite source)
And although our interpretations may not be perfect, absolute, or exact, the tool of communicating our experience to other beings has served immense value in the progress of interaction with living things.
Life of Pi
Thank you for sharing this story!