6.35: Writing Back: Guerilla Texts & BTS

 

The Blank Page and Precursive Faith

In our last episode, I either excited, frightened, or angered you, I’m betting. I mean, if you are anything like a typical reader, we are completely comfortable with books in any form we find them in—new, tattered, audio, and e—-because it means, usually, it’s just us and them. We might share a Goodreads review now and then, perhaps make a recommendation to a friend or coworker, but beyond this and books assigned for research, we don’t often think of our reading as I put it last episode. Now if you missed that discussion on the Ethic of Reading, go back and grab it, but here is the crux, the final straw, perhaps:

So my flag: The energy generated by the friction of reading must be used to ideologically, physically, and structurally alter the world.  

And you already know what we’re going to talk about today, in general: writing back, my primary strategy for engaging the world beyond outright fisticuffs. Maybe you’ve heard me talk about this before in half a dozen places over the past couple of Journeys: in short, we use what we’ve read and put ourselves out into the world with our own words. 

I’ve already argued that reading is not the passive exercise we often pretend it to be: we immerse, we engage and think, we resist and accommodate, we expend energy and we refuel. Yes, imagination is involved, and curiosity, and we leave the reading experience altered, even in the slightest of ways. After weeks or a few titles, those changes become more clear. And now? We take those changes and we carry them back into the rest of our lives.

But, Steve, come on, now, writing? And, I say, critically, yes. Because yes, our work with our hands in volunteering, in “showing up,” is amazing and profound. But yes, too, our words can be left with others after we leave; they can spread on their own when we’re elsewhere; and they help us define our own purposes. 

But you and I have been here before, staring at the blank screen or empty page, terrified that what we might say isn’t worthy. Or worse, we don’t know where to begin at all, and that terrifies. Let’s call this a kind of “activist paralysis;” it’s not that we don’t want to speak out, exactly, but we can’t seem to actually make it happen. 

But put another way, our Emperor (any force that works to silence our story for its own)–that emperor wants us frozen by the blank page. It’s a strategy to keep us quiet: cultures of intimidation and imposter syndromes and any number of other factors. Put more starkly, the Hideous Bargain we’ve explored this entire Journey relies on our fear that our voices lack the authority to change anything.

I want to give us a few ways to think about this flag, today, offer us some tools to get past that paralysis, even some writing “prompts” of a sort to get us started. Here, I’ll give you one way to think about what we do right away, from our old friend of the hideous bargain and strenuous mood of moral outrage himself, William James.

He says that he understands part of our emotional psychology: we worry about writing because in our minds we first want a guarantee of success before we act. Why write, after all, if I fail, or my words fly off into the void and no one notices? If we knew in advance that people would agree with us and respond favorably. . . Or perhaps better still, our words cultivated a healthy and thoughtful debate that itself spurred action for justice. . . Well, that is another story, give me the pen! James understands that need, a guarantee we just cannot be given.

But then in his 1895 essay, “Is Life Worth Living?” he offers us his notion of precursive faith, that once we believe that our words and actions can produce change, they are in fact more likely to do so. Now, at first glance, this sounds a bit like manifestation or wishful thinking: Professor Harold Hill’s “Think System.” But no, James is on to something else here. Remember, he’s a pragmatist, about real measurable growth. He knows that our brains require a kind of psychological fuel to move forward, and our faith in the real possibility for real change drives us to act and write which itself produces that possibility. Without that action, of course, the change cannot happen.

And he knows the universe isn’t about to surrender easily to our pens. Our work is serious, ethical, civic, and even combative. Part of our goals as Frictional Readers, too, is to discover a nuanced and complicated debate which is essential to deliberative democracy. After all, we’re talking about a moral and social reconstruction of our ideologies here. James describes the world as “half-wild, half-saved,” and so in desperate need of our thoughtful intervention. But that intervention means embracing something you and I have talked about before: uncertainty. And we have our precursive faith that somewhere in that uncertainty change is possible. 

But I’ll offer you one more idea, taking James’s idea a single step further. It’s easy, once we imagine what change in the world might look like. You and I? We don’t need permission to plant a flag; we don’t even want permission—not from the Emperor. We sit down before our paper or our screens, and I’m telling you this with real sincerity:

The very act of writing those first few letters, those opening words, the very act of striking the keyboard, is the opening salvo for that combative self which knocks down a garden wall somewhere. The world has changed at that very moment, . . . . because you have changed. 

 

Theme

 

This is Literary Nomads, where we wander through literature and language, near and far.

I’m Steve Chisnell, and you know what? I don’t need permission to write. 

World Alterations

 

So my flag: The energy generated by the friction of reading must be used to ideologically, physically, and structurally alter the world.  

Maybe we should take a moment to open up my claim here. To be sure, I’m not asking you to read William Blatty’s The Exorcist or Stephen Graham Jones’s The Only Good Indians and suddenly go make restitution to the Catholic Church or Blackfeet traditions. I’m saying that reading such works frictionally—that is, slowing down to ask hard questions of them and ourselves— produces a thoughtful, critical energy, a heat from friction if you wish, about our own responsibility to the phenomena we experience. Maybe Blatty’s book (the film less so) pushes back hard against modern science and bureaucracies; or Graham’s gets us reflecting on our own responsibilities to trauma, guilt, and the rightness of retribution. Just as ideas. 

Where do we lever such questions outward? Who needs to hear our work with them? What we do with that energy, while we have it, likely combined with a dozen other reading experiences which have also worked on us, means that our way of talk changes, and who we meet is encountered in our ideologically-challenging thought. Maybe we find ourselves re-examining our own behaviors, relationships, and personal investments with others. Our physical rebuilding of our daily lives impacts others. And, too, we might find ourselves working with others for the same purposes, in reforming and reinventing the spaces we live structurally. 

Can you, on your own, alter the entire complex of the conditional structures of capitalism? That would be cool, if so. Please don’t wait for my approval, though. You go ahead, I’ll follow. No, but those questions we ask, when shifted from the internal beach chair—or rather, in the case of these two horror works, from the flashlight-space under the bedcovers—when those questions emerge from that moment of reading in manifestly different behavior, we’ve already begun the work. But they don’t happen if we just read them for funzies, you know?

 

 

Anti-Rebels and New Sincerity

 

But it’s a whole different thing when we suddenly talk about writing, isn’t it? I’ll even go and find an old middle school playground bully to hug in forgiveness rather than write something for the public.

More seriously, yes, our world is kind of a vicious place to put words in public, sometimes. Our social economies weaponize ironyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More and snark to keep us all comfortably passive, never daring to write beyond some kind of “cool detachment.”  I mean, I can repost a meme or political comment because that’s not, you know, really me there.  It’s someone else, and I just put it there for my friends to see and offer their thoughts on: an intellectual exercise. But not something that will change anyone.

To offer another strategy, I want to take us back to the 1990s where some dude named David Foster Wallace saw a lot of this coming. He was more concerned about television, then, but I can easily see his same anxiety projected about 100 fold onto today’s internet. 

Now Wallace, he of Infinite Jest fame, had a lot of pretty extreme ideas: many I just can’t get behind, and we aren’t going to take the time today to break down his massive canonCanon means "center," and a literary canon is a set of works... More of work and social commentary. But in his essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” he argues how TV has made us all cynical and indifferent, passive consumers who refuse to connect to anything as significant: he calls it the “sneer trap.”  When the role of art should work to make us feel less alone, TV and contemporary art often do the opposite. He says:

The ironyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More is that we are in a prison of our own making, a prison that is only made of our own laughter.  

We’ve made the lives of others so much a part of our lives that we’ve mistaken the audience for the actors. They do the doing for us. 

The answer is to rebel against this growing passivity and cynicism. For Wallace, the ultimate subversive act must not be yet another cynical rant. Instead, it is an absolute, vulnerable earnestness. We might call it being sentimental—those who follow Wallace call it the New Sincerity. I might say that it is the risk of being called “cringe.”

And therefore the strategy for us as writers, perhaps, is to describe what we feel. This is not virtue-signaling, which is empathy as performance, working to build our online persona or brand. And it can’t be sad-fishing, posting just for the desperate attention of likes. Both are a kind of sham. Wallace is talking about writing what we believe, what we think, what we feel, without ironyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More or sarcasm, and without armor. Maybe we bleed a little on the page, and maybe we don’t. If we’re angry, we’re angry; or sad, or uncertain, or worried. Or ready, or braced, or engaged. But whatever it is, we stand out as writers with purpose because we are sincere. 

I admit that this is difficult for me, too. I suspect that my persona is probably around 87% ironic; most of that is a kind of meta-irony, where I hover between ironyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More and sincerity so that we can’t really tell exactly where a particular statement falls—like this one. The other part of my ironyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More is an ironic sincerity, where I’m totally sincere even while I take on a tone of absurdity. Either way, whatever else I’m doing, it’s clear enough that my ironyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More always exists as a bit of protection, a means of warding off accusations or criticism. 

And I won’t pretend it’s not a choice. Our culture may have conditioned me to think and write and speak this way, but it is not in any way inevitable: I have it in my power to change it. I just have to choose.

If I were a teacher offering advice here, it might sound like this: “Just write what you feel.”  But oh, that simple direction comes packed with a lot of backstory now, doesn’t it? Write what you believe; write what you feel; because anything else is part of the social game of isolation that is part of the problem, the shrugs from the people of Omelas.

Earnest Pleas from Marvin Gaye

 

I want now to turn to a couple of texts I’ve been wanting to talk about for several months, and I’m glad I found a place here to discuss them.

The first is from 1971, just a couple of years before our Le Guin story, and it’s nothing less than the original Marvin Gaye and his song, “What’s Going On?”  There’s a lot to say about this song, but let’s begin with the basics for you younger-types who weren’t around when it ruled radio. 

Clearly it’s a protest song, one laid squarely in an era of Viet Nam protests and police crackdowns and the like. Gaye’s lyrics are simple and poignant, openly asking about what he sees: 

Mother, mother

There’s too many of you crying

Brother, brother, brother

there’s far too many of you dying

and later,

Father, father

We don’t need to escalate

You see, war is not the answer

For only love can conquer hate

You know we’ve got to find a way

To bring some lovin’ here today

Long before David Foster Wallace, of course, we have writers using all degrees of sincerity and concern. It’s–it’s almost like the song requires no academic analysis at all. And you know, jeez, that’s kind of the point. Gaye was a plenty smart guy, but he didn’t need to use any expertise like academic political theory to talk about what he saw and believed. What we have here is intimate language from a single man; he’s showing what Cavarero calls upon all of us to demonstrate: the “Necessity of Care” for those who are vulnerable.

Wallace’s New Sincerity asks that writers risk vulnerability and earnestness rather than hide behind ironyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More or intellectualism. One guy I heard talking about the song said that “every note that he sings feels like the emotion he’s trying to project.” Look, for instance, how quickly he draws us into the small space of home and family, directly asking these questions of a mother, brother, and father. 

Like I said, this was an era of war and police brutality, but it was also a time when his singing partner Tammi Terrell died. Gaye was disillusioned. Already he had become a successful artist with Motown Records, but to do that, he was part of that company’s assembly line of policy and profit-making: his job was to churn out three-minute radio love songs. 

But then, in 1971, comes this kind of moral awakening. He asks a simple question, I think: how can I keep producing nothing but love songs when all around me are these injustices, this world falling apart around me? He refused to let his art do nothing but pacify us: he needed to speak about the failures of our system. William James’s strenuous mood. 

Importantly, I think, was that no one in the business wanted him to do this. Motown’s profit formula demanded uncontroversial, safe music. Stuff that both black and white audiences in and out of Detroit would buy. Motown’s president Berry Gordy said that politics was “not our bag,” that the job was to bring people together. Gordy refused to release Gaye’s song, saying that it went “too far” and that its vocal scat was “old.”

In response, Gaye went on strike, refusing to record any more until Gordy changed his mind. But then, secretly, someone in the company went and pressed about 100,000 copies of the single and rushed them to the radio stations and stores. “What’s Going On?” did an end run around the gate-keeping and got into public. It didn’t require permission. 

And can I offer an interpretation of the party noises which hover behind all of his woeful but gentle lyrics? That ambient party is apparently from a homecoming party for a returning Viet Nam vet, but there’s an unease. It’s the auditory equivalent of Summer Festivals in Omelas. It’s a great jazz groove and occasion for celebration, but Gaye puts the Suffering Child right in its middle. You and I can’t enjoy the music without confronting the hideous bargain on the streets outside. 

 

 

The Sewol Ferry Tragedy: BTS

 

To describe Korea’s BTS as a superpower phenomenon of K-Pop is just plain accurate. I’ve had them on my list to discuss way back when “Butter” was the hot thing. I confess I am not so devoted that I count myself among its Army, but if there are some listening who do, please please correct any of my mistakes and oversights.

Let’s talk about one of their songs, 2017’s “Spring Day” as the modern version of the kind of Writing Back I suggest. For Le Guin, the hypothesis is enough, a single suffering child in the basement of a fantasy world. The young men of BTS take Le Guin’s story and draw it on top of the devastating real-world story of the 2014 Sewol Ferry disaster.

Over three hundred passengers died in this South Korean ferry tragedy, but 250 were high school students on a field trip. This would be enough, but it’s not enough. The ferry’s captain abandoned the ship to save himself; and he told the students explicitly to stay in their cabins below deck. . . . Afterwards, sadly too common in a country geared to suppress guilt and shame, a number of government cover-ups attempted to bury the story to preserve the reputations of those in power. But the band quite literally could not sit quietly while the comforts of the powerful were prioritized over the lives of innocent youth.

To listen to the lyrics alone (which are in Korean), we might not immediately know the song’s topic:

I miss you

Saying it like this makes me miss you even more

Even while I’m looking at your picture

I still miss you

Time’s so cruel, I hate us

Now it’s hard to even see each other’s faces

It’s all winter here, even in August, winter comes

My heart is running on time, alone on the snow piercer

I want to go to the other side of the world, holding your hand to put an end to this winter

How much snow must fall for that spring day to come, friend?

But it’s the video that winds everything together. There’s a link to it in the Show Notes. Among the many images, much of the tensionAs a literary term, I often use this in place of "conflict" ... More is created through the setting of a motel with a neon sign that reads “Omelas.”  

Inside the motel, the band members are shown engaging in the “false happiness” of the city—throwing cake, playing with firecrackers, streamers and celebrations. Soon enough, the party wears out: the members are gloomy, hollow. Then we suddenly find them on a mountain of discarded clothes, those of the ferry victims. There and on and around a train that the lyrics describe as snow piercer, they choose public mourning over the blissful ignorance of the hotel party. And, quickly, I’ll mention that the SnowPiercer train is a Korean science fiction film where the passengers are divided harshly by class: the wealthy living in luxury up front while the poor are left to fend for themselves in violence and death. 

Like Gaye’s “What’s Going On?” there is nothing here that is aggressive or cynical or ironic or even a political rant. It’s simply a beautiful song about melancholy and grief, of longing, of winter too slowly turning to spring. One band member finds a pair of shoes washed up on the beach and hangs them from the bare branches of a winter tree to honor that victim. We see a worn out carousel decorated with the yellow ribbons that the country used to memorialize the victims. Intimate humble language of shared human grief: Wallace’s New Sincerity.

At the climax of the video, the members step off the Snowpiercer train of exploitation, but then they do something really important, especially in light of Le Guin’s story. Remember Le Guin’s narrator who tells us that those who walk away do so alone: 

 “Each one goes alone, youth or girl, man or woman.” 

BTS rewrites the story here, refusing this kind of solitary exile. We don’t write back, we don’t speak, we don’t act, because so often we feel like we’re alone.  But for BTS, they leave the train, and we see them walking across the thawing snow-covered field together, to the tree which represents that tragedy. And, not coincidentally, the name of the album where this song appears? You Never Walk Alone.  Resistance to the hideous bargain cannot be an individual retreat; we require radical collective solidarity. 

For those of you who don’t know BTS well, I’ll point out that by the time this song appeared in 2017, BTS was firmly anchored in the world of popular entertainment, blockbuster concerts, and the now-typical K-Pop promotions of its individual members. But it was hardly a stranger to works of political consciousness and literary depth.

They’ve criticized the Korean school system that turns students into “studying machines” and pressures them to give up their dreams for bureaucratic jobs. They’ve criticized the stagnant social mobility of Korea and the inequalities built between older and younger generations. 

In 2016’s “Am I Wrong,” they sang “If you see the news and don’t feel anything… you’re not normal, you’re abnormal,” arguing exactly what we’ve been discussing, corruption and apathy. They’ve critiqued capitalism and consumer culture in a number of songs, along with social media activism and political polarization. Did I say they were, um, popular?

But part of what builds the BTS Army is the band’s smart work with literature, too. We could spend several episodes (and maybe will sometime) connecting its 2016 album WINGS to the Hermann Hesse novel from 1919, Demian; both question the challenges of coming of age and loss of innocence.  And suddenly, K-Pop is deep, taking on the dualities of the binary opposition to examine the whole human, a synthesis of contradictions, and how to gain sovereignty of our lives, we must sacrifice the supposed innocence of childhood. 

Now, to understand the band’s work, millions had to read a 100-year-old German novel. Not a bad approach, a kind of civic act of collective research. I like thinking about it this way: by linking their art to Hesse’s literature, the band is Writing Back to the K-Pop industry’s demand for shallow content, just like Gaye resisted Motown Records efficiency models, industries participating in a kind of psychology of complicity. And BTS said, you know what? Young people can and should be the people asking the most difficult questions—and they want to.

How many have read Le Guin’s story as a result of “Spring Day”? I couldn’t guess, but I’ll bet it’s more than we think. 

Guerilla Texts

 

So let’s take a moment and shift from our tone or approach to Writing Back and to talk about the writing act. Let’s talk about what we’ll call “guerilla texts.” 

We can think of this kind of writing as improvised, unsanctioned. By this I mean it doesn’t play by the rules. There are no school assignment directions, no places where permission is asked of the hows and whys and whats. Guerilla warfare scared the traditional military folks because it was unpredictable. It came out of nowhere, did what it wanted, and left. 

Now I’m talking about this in terms of what we make, how it is given to others to be read, even the motivation behind it. It need not be a clandestine Black Ops operation with grappling hooks and gas canisters. But, you know, it could be.       Metaphorically, I mean.

But I don’t want you to lock yourself into the status quo here. Have an idea? Try it out. We no longer need editorial boards and formal publishers to get our stuff out there to be seen. Put it out there on your terms. That may be sending out QR codes or passing out flyers like its the 19th century. It could be dropping an essay into some online forum where it might not belong or reading aloud in some unexpected space. In this way, one way to think about it is that how you send it out is itself part of its message. 

Whatever it is or says, it isn’t passive. It’s not about surrendering to the apathetic or the corrupt; and it’s not about imitating the social media and streaming cultures of ironyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More out there. Maybe, radically and subversively, it’s humble, earnest, has genuine emotion, is willing to risk being cringy instead of being a performance.

And sure, we know that it may not accomplish what we set out for it to do; but we also know going in that it just might: it might change someone’s thinking, steer a conversation or two, move us towards a behavior change, get readers to ask more questions than they did before. As writers, we’re not formal institutional experts: we’re real people willing to speak up and create a different reality than the one we’re living. We are experts of our lived experience.

If you’re looking for a form or approach, try a “Letter to Humanity,” similar to what I’ve described in earlier Writing Back episodes. Write it to people who you hope will think differently. Or it could simply be a manifesto of your own: that is, you could choose not to talk about what you want others to do: write about who you’ve decided to be, what you’ve chosen to believe in, what you will do. Your personal manifesto for change.

When I took the time to create a Readers Manifesto for Waywords Studio, this is what I first had in mind. Some suggested to me that the word “manifesto” sounded too militant or revolutionary. I gotta admit, that reading of it convinced me to keep it; manifestos are actionable, perhaps even combative in some ways. They are absolute and unapologetic descriptions of who we are and what we will do. By the way, those Readers Manifestos, if you want one, are available for free download at Waywords Studio. There are versions for creators, adult readers, and then for high school, middle school, and elementary school. Never too young.  

But whatever you did with your writing, if you think of it as a Guerilla Text, you may find for yourself more opportunities for it.  We can think of this writing as a “tactical occupation” of the Emperor’s tools. You remember Pueblo writer Simon Ortiz that we spoke about some episodes ago? He reminds us that we don’t have to be purely “off the grid” for it to work. Write back in the same language as the colonizer; write your message on their own digital and social platforms; all of this is a kind of occupation work, speaking inside the space which is working to oppress. Use these tools for your own purposes. 

And if you just can’t think of a place to send your writing? Never forget that you can send it here to Literary Nomads where we can read it, discuss it, or whatever you’d like. Use the Mailbag link in the Show Notes to send it! And no worries–no critiques here; a few missteps here and there is part and parcel to what writing into public entails. 

What upsets, angers or saddens you? What causes anxiety? Write to it. Write to others who have met it. Write to yourself a manifesto of response. Let those first keystrokes be the opening volley of the response to come. Let those reading it find themselves asking questions, being challenged, become estranged from their ideas of “normal.”

Get your hands on the keyboard. Operate on precursive faith. Speak to the Emperor. 

Go read something. Then write back.

Outro

 

Follow me and find me along with supplements, bonus episodes, resources, newsletters, and still more at Waywords Studio dot com.  That’s Waywords Studio (two s’s in the middle) dot com. Thanks for listening! 

Music for Literary Nomads is by Randon Myles

Chapter headings by Natalie Harrison and Sarah Skaleski

Literary Nomads is a production of Waywords Studio. Find me at Waywords Studio on most social media and at Waywords Studio .com.

 

Bibliography

 

BTS. “Spring Day.” You Never Walk Alone, 2017. YouTube, https://youtu.be/xEeFrLSkMm8.

DeClerck, AR. “Reflections: Those Who Walk Away from Omelas & BTS’ Spring Day.” Medium, 10 Apr. 2022.

Gaye, Marvin. “What’s Going On.” What’s Going On, Tamla, 1971.

Hesse, Hermann. Demian. S. Fischer Verlag, 1919.

James, William. “Is Life Worth Living?” The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, Longmans, Green, and Co., 1897, pp. 32-62.

Lazore, Courtney. “BTS Spring Day Analysis — The BTS Effect.” The BTS Effect, 10 Nov. 2019.

Russell, Melody. “The Enduring Meaning Behind Marvin Gaye’s Signature Hit ‘What’s Going On?'” American Songwriter, 21 Aug. 2023.

Sigongsa. “Regarding to ‘Omelas’ and BTS ‘Spring Day’.” Translated by ARMY Salon, ARMY Salon Blog, 8 Jan. 2018.

Wallace, David Foster. “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.” Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol. 13, no. 2, 1993, pp. 151-194.