A Personal Reflection on Weibel and Graham

"Writing is the ideal medium for practicing transcendence and yearning for it. If religious is a technique of transcendence, then writing, as a medium of transcendence, is the ideal medium for it." (Weibel 2011, 33)

In the final year of my creative writing degree I completed a project about writing and reading. There were two parts. The first was a creative work, a diary of my adventures in reading over nine months; the second, an exegesis, examined methods for writing about literature beyond traditional critical approaches. It mined the possibilities of diary/memoir as forms suited to personal and critical analysis of literature, and took the creative work I produced as an example. As a thesis/exegesis, the document was not terribly successful. Its logic was circular, its terminology unclear, its purpose ill-defined: it was hastily thrown together. 

Writing the creative piece was an experience of the kind described by Weibel: it was transcendent. It very difficult to step aside from the practice of, and yearning for transcendence that was the experience of writing and rewriting the diary to examine it as a text for the purpose of the exegesis. Thus the circular logic, the lack of precision, boundaries, definitions. It wasn't that the text had become a holy scripture, but rather the process of creating seemed of itself sacred, inviolable.

In the diary I wrote, I used the novels I was reading just as  Graham explains: "as ways of rehearsing and examining questions of belief, meaning and spirituality" (2007, 68). And so the piece I wrote was as much a reflection on the content of the novels and the process of reading and writing,  as it was a deeply personal self-reflection; a literary embodiment. Borrowing form Graham's vernacular I might say that I used he resources of culture to examine questions of ultimate personal/existential importance, and then turned the process of examination into a new material source. But that doesn't seem to capture the sanctity of the experience in the same way as it does if I borrow Weibel's language. 

Here is my attempt: In the novel there was the stored-up spoken word captured from the body of some other human that I will never know face-to-face. I have been able to meet him across barriers of time and space and take his word, incorporate it into my body, allow it to travel through me, examine me and pass out of me into my own words, onto my own page. I participated in this process of flesh becoming word, becoming flesh becoming word. It had all the power of a religious experience, and one's own religious experience is very hard to examine with anything approximating objectivity. Which made writing my exegesis very difficult indeed. 

References

Graham, E. 2007. '"What We Make of the World": The Turn to Culture in Theology and the Study of Religion'. In G. Lynch, Ed. Between Sacred and Profane: Researching Religion and Popular Culture. London and New York: I.B. Taurus &Co. Ebook.

Weibel, P. 2011. 'Religion as a Medium - the Media of Religion'. In B Groys and P Weibel, Eds. Medium Religion: Faith, Geopolitics, Art. 30 - 43. Koln: Verlag der Buchhandlung, Walher Konig.