An Assail
'The world is charged with the grandeur of God.'
Note: Redrafting and cleaning a long text like this is time-consuming and even somewhat counter-productive of the idea, so if the photos are difficult to read for you, please place all blame squarely on me and scroll down to the typed version. I’ll try write more neatly in any future such pieces, but make no promises. Prose flows quicker than poetry and neatness and speed in handwriting, for my style, are inversely correlated.
Any criticism or commentary on any work worth the effort runs a double risk. The devil, on the one side, is the temptation to outshine or overshadow the object while the deep blue sea, on the other, sings seductive of the ease with which one might plunge pompously into the error of the typical commencement speaker: using the purported subject as nothing short of a thin pretext for talking about oneself and one’s pet theories/ideology/etc.
Properly done, of course, one ought to have some sort of insight (although the modern/post-modern fetish of ‘originality’ in the sense of ‘no one has ever published this though before’ is an artifact of forced writing and/or writing for profit—only in those contexts is there a deep concern about plagiarism), but the work should always treat itself as a fundamentally separate yet dependent thing in relation to its subject. That object is the ground from which one works—in criticism, one can expand this to works by the same author/artist/director or even to the genre generally (so long as one identifies the genre accurately and has a good grasp thereof), in commentary, one draws from outside only to make explicit what is implicit in the text itself, after all, the text did not appear ex nihilo.
Commentary in particular can serve, as many Biblical commentaries do, as instructive to others, but this is secondary to its primary purpose, which is to be instructive and elucidating to the author of the commentary itself, external instructive value is accidental, not necessary. There is great confusion on this point at present and the ways in which that confusion muddies the already confused waters of the “A.I.” situation is left as an exercise for the reader.
Understanding is a different thing from the regurgitation of information or opinion, and it is understanding which is the proper goal of education. Yet any mode of ‘objectively measuring’ understanding which can scale beyond a natural conversational group (eight people at the outside) without becoming massively unwieldy inevitably has to rely upon an informationally-based proxy for understanding. Over time, the proxy begins to seem like it is the thing that actually exists while what it stands in proxy for fades into an elusive and unimportant shade—in the minds of the measurers. But man has confused map for territory since language (the primal map) first arose; none of this is new, this is precisely a problem we’ve been navigating with less or more success throughout the entire history of our species, and doubtless a good portion of our prehistory.
Writing, without which neither criticism nor commentary would exist nor even be coherent as concepts, is a pretty recent development—and authorship in a unitary sense is later still… originality is a mere handful of generations old at most. The acquisition of spoken language is organically instinctive to human beings (though perhaps this was not always true) while literacy is not—one has to pause and wonder whether, at some point, perhaps not all that far in the future, literacy might not also become so organically instinctive—the ability to write and to read must be learned in the sense that it must be taught, at bare minimum by exposure to the idea of writing and reading and examples to imitate and learn from; at maximum by pulling a child kicking and screaming for years to the most basic level of literacy necessary to function in one’s society.
Since the advent of the ‘smartphone’ (what an odd term that seems on reflection in 2025… or else ominous) in what we so smugly refer to as the developed world, basic literacy has become essentially universal. Texting and social media have become so integral to human interaction that the impetus to be able to ‘read’ and ‘write’ in the minimal sense necessary to use these technologies has become overwhelmingly strong. And yet, among the more classically literate, there has been a long trend now of eschewing social media in all (or at least most) of its forms and it seems inevitable that there will be more and more in the same group who eschew texting as a replacement for human interaction (though its place as a practical and efficient means of coordinating more traditional in-person interactions seems secure at present). Nor does it seem unlikely but that a trend in voice-memos and text-to-speech functionality may well allow true illiteracy to arise once more among the technologically-reliant.
The universality of the calculator did not make basic arithmetical literacy impossible, but it did make it difficult to retain and consequentially rarer than it had been. The typewriter and then the personal computer did not utterly destroy handwriting, but (tand this text is an example of this, compare it in legibility and speed of composition to something by a casual writer of the nineteenth century and I will seem a complete dullard) it changed the nature of the act of writing itself and turned writing legibly and neatly into a minor specialized skill, like basic capentry [sic] or baking… not uncommon, precisely, but hardly essential and its lack is neither surprising nor remarkable. Walk into a coffee shop or small restaurant which uses a chalkboard menu or handwritten signage of some other sort and there will be one or two employees who have the skill, interest, and responsibility of writing those out: and any actual drawings or pictures will have infinitely more artistry to them than the handwriting itself (unless the employee is so specialized as to be a student of calligraphy), yet the handwriting itself is far more of an aesthetic statement than any visual art the business contains.
You must, dear reader, be wondering at this point in this essay what—on God’s green and blooming earth—the unifying point or thesis could possibly be. I began, after all, discussing commentary and criticism, excoriating the tendency to devolve into pet theories and self-indulgence… and where did I proceed to wander if not into the self-indulgence of stream-of-consciousness and gestures at pet-theories; bold and unduly general assertions; completely unjustified leaps from one subject to another and into arguments in which I have no business inserting myself, being expert in nothing but a few boring technical things which keep me fed and sheltered and have not bearing here? Perhas we could recover the original sense of the word ‘essay’ from the ravening academy somewhat by twisting it slightly into ‘assay.’ This is, then, this has been, an assay, a judgement, an assailing of a target where the target has been my wandering thought and the judgement has been of where it might lead if followed through by means of writing, rather than in speech or in simple thought itself (either of which would have produced vastly different chains of inference and reasoning). Such an assailing is more similar to a letter written to an audience than it is to an academic essay or a journalistic ‘piece.’ More toward an epistle than a journal entry, too, since it is written for an audience (whether it finds such an audience or not being an entirely different question, of course) other than the self… and yet, like all writing, it is still self-focussed, still an act of creation which clarifies the self (or some part thereof) somewhat. An artifact which bears testament to the imperfect assailing of the fortress of thought.
I’m honestly impressed if you actually read that whole rambling thing… it is, in the end, an experiment the results of which please me, but are probably worthless for anyone else. We’ll see whether more focus and neatness is in the offing in any future ‘assails’… or even whether it makes sense to continue publishing them. This probably would be a poor post to share, being quite unrepresentative of The Brass Bull as it has developed so far, so I’ll skip the button this time and if you do want to share, you’ll just need to click or tap an extra time today.