The Art of the Assay

I was just reading this post about why blogging frequency doesn’t matter, because everyone uses RSS now anyway, etc., etc. It struck me because even as I clicked the link to read it (obviously, because of the ingrained impulse to follow anything that seems to be countering folk wisdom, and folk wisdom has long been that Those Who Would Be Muchly Linked Must Post Often), I had just been thinking about Paul Graham, my favourite geek essayist, who has lately been producing essays more and more frequently. At least, it feels that way to me and my feedreader.

(No, I’m not going to actually figure out PG’s posting frequency: I’ll just ask Drac to include the Unofficial Paul Graham Feed into Ach, and then use BigBlogger. I remain highly gratified that the SL net has such fancy widgets to play with.)

It would be just perfect if PG decides to increase his blogging frequency at the same time that the meme goes around that coolness lieth in the decreasing of said frequency, because PG takes distinct pleasure in countering folk wisdom himself. And folk wisdom would thereby be doubly countered, overlapping with itself, and the internets brains would explode.

Paul Graham is an essayist by general acceptance, rather than a blogger. He experimented with the blog format at one point (on infogami, I think), but may or may not keep that up. Says he prefers to write essays. As anybody who speaks a smidgen of French will tell you, essayer is to try, to attempt -Graham has an excellent essay on the subject. An essay is therefore not unlike an assay, which is a weighing out, a measuring, a test or assessment -this is not surprising, because assay and essay used to be the same word. In everyday usage, “essay” for me has always suggested a finished product, a burdensome requirement for academia. Ugly, polished to a dull shine, something you can rattle off and be glad to see the back of. That is, it had for me precisely inverted its ancient meaning, that it should be unpolished, experimental and exploratory.

Which is a tremendous loss, if you think about it -we don’t need a word to mean “boring and shitty writing” as much as we need a word that means, essentially, “writing out loud”. We badly need a word that means that, because just thinking out loud isn’t getting a fellow very far these days. (Very long strings of thought, and who can even remember where one started?) If we are even capable any more, after having our brains mutilated by schooling, of writing essays that are really assays, exercises in thinking.

Language and thought are twinned beyond doubt, whether identical or fraternal, and so it is possibly misleading even to call it an exercise in thinking. Isn’t that another word whose meaning has shriveled into inversion? An exercise sounds dull, repetitive, mindless. Energetic, perhaps, associated with “practice makes perfect” and all the furious energy of a hamster on a wheel. But who associates “exercise” with “exploration”? Not me. At least, not until now -because the word itself tells us a thing which hopefully we will not soon forget.

We know that the superficial meaning of “exercise” (as opposed to the connotations above, which can be personal) is to use, to employ or put into play, to put into operation. Its secret meaning, visible among its roots, is to free from restraint. To free from containment or enclosure.

To cut loose.