Last week I committed the almost unforgivable sin of not checking my text before submission.
The result was dropping a clanger which still leaves me suffering shudders of shame. Writers can never leave others to clean up their faux pas.
When you undertake to put pen to paper, you must know what you are doing, and who you are writing for, and remember the humility of that fundamental truth which says you are only as good as your readers make you. Because all texts are reconfigured with every engagement according to the Reader-Response Theory of Louise Rosenblatt published in 1938.
In my column, I wrote that Mark Twain’s real name was Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It is in fact Samuel Langhorne Clemens. I make the necessary apologies and corrections and bow in reverent humility before the altar of personal integrity.
I will share with you an indulgence I allowed myself this weekend. I promised myself I would re-read a book. Big deal, you say. But it was something which people do or, put another way, something people don’t do often enough. There are reasons anyone would want to re-read a book.
Let me reassure you about the great joy, peace, serenity and empowerment I felt when I did that. I put all notions of domestic budget, load shedding, and even my rigorous personal hygiene regimen on semi-hold and fetched the book at the library and devoured it in a session of self-indulgence that gave me such pleasure for the duration of the read (two days).
Why would I take this as a topic when there are so many other things that require my labour in the vineyard of our dying country? It is because this lack of renewal is what is causing our distress. We are afraid to revisit the past with an open mind. We fear disappointment or refuse to restate relevances.
We have made fear, and blame the chief players in the field of health and health-giving discourse that might move us towards the truths that can set us free.
Re-reading a book takes careful thought. There is also a lot of visceral activity and instinctual and instinctive decision-making that takes you to that place. But when you have decided which text you are going to revisit, you then have to consider being disappointed.
You have to try to time your psychic readiness for going over familiar ground. You might end up discovering how much your thinking, receptivity, and instinctive reactions have shifted or moved away completely.
Like memory, some things have left your world and retired to a remote place where there is little left of yourself when you were young.
But going back to a favourite book (or author) is an indulgence each reader owes him or herself. There are the added bonuses that the book might since have morphed into a film or a TV series. All the more reason for you to do it. Because you can decide that old hoary conundrum with better equipment and experience; the one that asks whether books translate well to films or otherwise.
It was an experience I shall give myself again, and I will say now that I am revisiting another text (one more recent than my copious reading of my youth and student days). This one has been turned into a film that, in my humble opinion, turned out to be a lemon.
So, here is my contribution for this week. Simple, but riveting. Bordering on the silly? Perhaps. But the joy of rediscovering the text that impressed you so at first reading also takes you over ground that you had abandoned, notions that had ossified and ideas that were born screaming and reduced to a mere whimper.
It is a form of rejuvenation, self-renewal and reassurance that all is not lost. Feel free to e-mail or text me to find out which book I re-read. Here is a clue: the chief characters are Francesca Johnson and Robert Kincaid.
* Alex Tabisher.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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