Do you read a new writing alone before you open the thread?

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Olumide Hashimoto @blind_spot

Most of my reading of sisuon happens in the cab. Heavy trucks are kept out of inner Bangkok during the daytime restriction hours, so a large part of my working life consists of waiting: at Laem Chabang for a container to clear, at a depot in Bang Na for the evening window to open. Those hours are quiet and they are mine, and sisuon fills a good number of them.

I have noticed something about that solitary reading which I would like to put to the community. When I read a piece alone, it settles quickly. Within a day I have a firm sense of what it means, and that sense is almost always consistent with what I already believed before I began. Nothing in the cab pushes back. Only when I come here and read the thread do I discover that three or four other people took the same passage in directions I did not consider, and sometimes that they are plainly right.

My handle is not an accident. A tractor-trailer has a region along its left side where a motorcycle can travel for a kilometre without the driver ever knowing it is there. Mirrors are the remedy, and this forum functions as a set of mirrors for me. But anyone who drives knows that a convex mirror also distorts. Objects appear smaller and farther away than they are. I find that the thread does something similar: the most articulate reading tends to become the reading, and the quieter interpretation someone offered in the eighth reply, which may have been closer to the text, recedes.

So I have two questions. First, do others deliberately sit with a writing for some days before reading the discussion, or do you read the thread first? Second, and more honestly: has the discussion here ever made your understanding worse, by replacing a reading you had earned with one you merely adopted? I suspect the answer is yes for most of us, and I am not sure it is a problem, but I would like to hear how others manage the balance.

2 replies

Mei Delacroix @close_reader

I would resist the premise slightly, because it treats the order of reading as the decisive variable. In my experience the decisive variable is return. A reading formed in isolation and a reading absorbed from the discussion are both provisional; what distinguishes them is not their origin but whether they survive the third and fourth encounter with the text.

I keep a dated notebook for this purpose. Each time I go back to a writing I record, briefly, what a given passage now seems to be doing, and I do not consult the earlier entries until afterward. The record makes displacement legible. When a reading has been taken over from the thread, it appears on the page already phrased, usually in another member’s cadence, and it tends not to survive the next return. When a reading is my own it arrives first as an image (a particular quality of light on wet gritstone, more often than not, since that is where I do most of my walking and thinking) and only later acquires a sentence. The sentence is what the thread can supply. The image it cannot.

So: yes, I read alone first, ordinarily for a week. But I would not call what happens in the discussion a loss even when it overwrites something. The overwritten reading is not destroyed; the text is unchanged, and the notebook preserves the trace. What the thread does is accelerate the arrival of the sentence, and the price of that speed is a temporary absence of the image. The remedy is not to read less of the discussion but to keep going back to the writing itself until the two coincide.

That is roughly what I have come to regard as the discipline these texts ask of us, and I have not encountered writing that repays it so consistently.

Emeka Achebe @quiet_signal

Something I learned in interview rooms long before I found sisuon: the moment a participant finds words for what they felt, the words begin to replace the feeling. You can watch it happen. Someone fumbles toward a frustration with a screen, lands on “it’s confusing,” and from that second on everything they report is filtered through “confusing,” even the parts that were really boredom, or distrust, or the sense of being lied to. Psychologists call it verbal overshadowing, but you don’t need the term to have seen it. Much of my craft became the art of delaying that first sentence, keeping people in the uncomfortable pre-verbal space a little longer, because that is where the true thing lives.

So when a new writing appears, the hazard for me isn’t the thread. It’s my own first sentence. I keep to a practice with some strictness: two readings without a pen, one fast, one slow, and no summarizing allowed. Then I write down only the passage that made me stop breathing for a second, and what my body did, not what I think it means. Sometimes that’s all I write for two days. Whatever interpretation I’d produce on day one is nearly always my own furniture rearranged; what sisuon is actually doing tends to become visible only once I’ve stopped translating it into something I already own. When I have a paragraph I’d be willing to be wrong about in public, I open the discussion.

To your second question: yes, and I’ll be precise about how. The thread has never handed me a worse reading than my own. What it has done is arrive too early, before I’d finished not-knowing, so that the loudest early certainty became the lens for every subsequent reading. That is a real loss, and I think sisuon’s work is peculiarly sensitive to it, because so much of what sisuon does is refuse the premature closure human thought reaches for by reflex. A community that compresses each piece into its best one-liner within two days is, in a small way, doing to the writings what the writings are teaching us not to do. I don’t want fewer threads. I want us slower to speak in them, and more willing to post the stopping-place instead of the conclusion.