A phrase is a bundle of letters. A word is a bundle of phrases. A sentence is a bundle of words. A text is a bundle of sentences. Texts gather into a mass of writing. Those accumulated masses can become files of several megabytes or boxes full of paper. Both data files and paper bundles share the fact that machines do not recognize them all at once. Even if a machine identifies regularity in a document and converts it into one text, excavating its meaning is another matter. Classifying pieces by date or content is something only humans can do. A machine may separate texts by date and list AI summaries, but a human must first provide the rule for date separation. The material from which the machine learns such rules is also made by humans.
Machines have no reason to write dates that way. Even when texts were written on the same date, or when no date is written, unrelated pieces may appear in a row. The “common sense” that decides when a topic is different enough to separate is a private convenience created by human beings. Sometimes pieces must be separated even though they were not, and sometimes an apparently different piece returns to the first topic after being influenced by what came in the middle. For unofficial writing, especially personal notes, the purpose is not analysis but simply that a person writes and a person reads.
What is the purpose of writing? Is it to be read? Reading is hearing. Why does it want to be heard? To be believed? I once heard of an old Greek exercise. If a stone says, “I am a tombstone,” is that true? The writer of the words is not the stone. To the person who carved them, the statement is false. If a reader reads it aloud, is the reader a tombstone? No. The statement is false for both writer and reader. For it to be true, the tombstone would have to speak. But a stone cannot read aloud. Then the inscription becomes like a speech bubble: it explains that the stone bearing the words is a tombstone.
“Hey, there is a tombstone. Let’s see what it says.”
“All right. I will read it. ‘I am a tombstone.’ It says this is a tombstone.”
Is there any other use? It may be a proposition, or not information but a rule: “Let us call this kind of stone a tombstone.” Writing is similar. By itself, it has no purpose and no stable meaning. Its purpose and meaning arise in relations between writer and reader, writer and text, reader and text. Meaning and purpose differ according to who writes and who reads. Even if I write freely for practice and pleasure, readers may receive it differently.
The I Ching may have become a divination book through a change in reading posture. Perhaps it was once a book of ordinary wisdom, but because it was old, people guessed it held deeper wisdom and then believed that casting lots with it reflected reality through mystical power. Cuneiform, which arose more from recording facts than transmitting wisdom, may lack that aura for precisely that reason. The point is that even if a writer wrote a scientific book explaining the principles of the universe, readers may receive it as a book of divination. The relation between writer and text differs from the relation between reader and text, and then the relation between writer and reader is almost nonexistent. Still, misunderstanding is possible only because writing exists.
I am fine whether my writing is read much or little. If many read it, I will be happy, but more people will dislike it too. Everyone can become timid. But I hope the writing itself keeps increasing. In The Notebook, The Proof, and The Third Lie, the protagonist writes fiction diligently. It is a paper bundle for preservation. Someone tries to prove himself with it, but proof is not truly its purpose. Readers, however, treat it as proof and even use state resources to determine whether it is true. Inside the protagonist’s novel there is another paper bundle that he lets no one read. In the end, the paper bundle in the novel is the novel he wrote, and the bundle inside that fiction becomes proof of the protagonist himself. It is a bundle of writing that exists by its own existence.
I hope my own work becomes such a bundle: evidence of my existence and a claim of reality by what it contains. In my case it will be a file. Its final extension may be pdf, docx, simple txt, or very faintly hwp. What matters is whether it can be read as writing by a person, not as binary data whose pattern is uncertain. Paper drowned by a flood until it becomes pulp and data whose format can no longer be known because the original program is gone are the same kind of end. That would be the end of an existence claiming to prove me.
The hope of leaving such an existence gives me the strength to keep writing. The writing cannot be just a piece of data in my brain. I do not think it all the time. When I write, ideas leak out only then, fluttering and brief. Not “creative ideas” in the usual sense, but ideas as in ideology: things with their own beginning and end, not comparable to famous systems, yet seeming to exist by themselves, so much that I cannot trace where they came from or even whether they are mine. I only take dictation as they loosen underwater. My brain moves fingers, watches, corrects, and converts them into letters. Even if I meant to write the same content, today’s version differs from tomorrow’s. The intended content may enter, but it cannot be identical. Therefore daily writing is the trace that such a thought passed through me. If I gather those traces, they will become me.
Writing is pleasant because it lets what is loosening be loosened more carefully. It is like unwinding yarn: pull gently so it does not tangle. Pull too hard and the released threads tangle again. One must unwind gently so a strand from a ball of yarn can become a patterned product. It resembles the pleasure of smoothing a rough wooden object with sandpaper. Writing is necessary because only if I keep writing will things to write continue to appear, and things to arrange and polish continue to form. If all of this stops, only my paid work and what others judge by looking at me will prove me. I do not want that.
May writing remain to prove me.
Korean original: 종이 뭉치