Losing One's Mind

A truly mind-blowing essay from Barrett Mandel: “Losing One’s Mind: Learning to Write and Edit” (1978). The piece is a careful phenomenology of the act of writing and revising text. If we pay very close attention to what happens as we compose, we discover that we can no longer defend traditional arguments about how writing happens or how we should teach students to go about writing.

Mandel argues that we commonly imagine writing as if it were the transcription of some already existing and completed mental content: we sort through the lumber yard of our mind, choose the right materials, and then make our assembly at the jobsite of our desks. In this understanding, “a writer’s conscious thoughts cause the writing to occur” (363). But that’s all wrong, according to Mandel. Instead, writing is fundamentally an odd sort of amanuensis, a taking of dictation “which emanates from some point other than the conscious ego” (364). It doesn’t emerge from the conscious mind; rather, the mind merely “takes credit” for whatever ultimately appears on the page:

Writing doesn’t lay out the notions that are lying dormant in the mind waiting to be displayed. Writing is the “seeing into” process itself. It is the tearing through the mind’s concepts. The process itself unfolds truths which the mind then learns. Writing informs the mind; it is not the other way around. Insights resulting from writing, whether about the building of a better chicken coop or about the nature of man, once written become the property of the mind and then in turn need, for the writer’s future development, to be bypassed or set aside, so as to allow room for new insights. The mind (that is, our consciousness) receives and parrots; it does not generate new cognition or insights. (366)

The piece is full of insights like these that utterly defamilarize the process of writing, revealing a deep mystery at the heart of all articulation.