来源：https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/writing-as-communion
本文是系列文章的第四篇。
这是系列文章“首先我们塑造自己的社交图谱，然后它再塑造我们”的第四部分。第二部分是《为你的思维收集训练数据》（部分需付费阅读），第三部分是《一篇博客文章是一个非常长且复杂的搜索查询，旨在找到有趣的人，并让他们将有趣的内容转发到你的收件箱》。这些文章可以独立阅读。
一
在我二十岁出头的时候，当我主要写口语诗歌时，我常说纸上的文字并不是诗。这些文字更像是编程代码。诗是当你在观众的“编译器”中运行这些文字时，它们所转化成的东西。诗是一种房间里的氛围，是随后在大厅里可能发生的某些类型对话的可能性——比如大男人哭泣，想起他们的祖母，或者类似的事情。那些眼泪才是诗。
当你以这种方式思考写作时，你所做的与其说是构建句子，不如说是在与观众的关系中提取一种潜在的可能性。你尝试各种短语，观察反应，即兴发挥一点，逐渐地，你会在这场作者与观众之间的对话中发现一些比你独自完成的作品更大的东西。
英国喜剧演员吉米·卡尔（Jimmy Carr）在最近的一次采访中谈到了这一点：
观众是天才。他们立刻就能分辨出，这个好笑，那个不好笑，这个可以接受，那个不能接受。他们对所有这些东西做出判断，所以你只是在呈现内容，然后问：“这样可以吗？那样行吗？”
卡尔说他每天晚上都会花五分钟尝试新笑话，大部分都不成功，但有一些是好的，一年后，观众已经为他提供了足够多的素材，让他录制一场喜剧专场。几乎可以说，这场专场原本就潜藏在观众之中。
如果你看马丁·路德·金演讲的文字记录，你也能看到这个过程——他如何在舞台上通过每晚即兴发挥、对观众的反应做出回应，使内容逐渐丰富起来。最著名的例子当然是，他在华盛顿特区的林肯纪念堂前告诉观众他有一个梦想时，马哈莉亚·杰克逊（Mahalia Jackson）喊道：“告诉他们你的梦想，马丁！”于是他把讲稿放到一边，开始即兴发挥，引用了他在之前几个月里在舞台上发展出的许多意象。
我把这种写作方式称为“共融式”的，并且我部分地以这种方式看待我在博客上的创作。我写下的很多内容（包括这篇文章）都是由别人向我提出的问题所引发的，而滋养我创作过程的输入往往来自于通过博客认识的人——有人给我推荐书籍，有朋友的结交，还有评论和批评，这些都迫使我去深化和锐化我的思考。
写作是被写作召唤出的社交图谱的产物。
尽管我非常喜爱这种写作的共融性，但它同时也让我感到害怕。爱与恐惧：这两种情感在我的心中并存。
二
这种恐惧听起来很像布莱恩·伊诺（Brian Eno）的感受：
当然，因你所做的事情而受到赞誉真的非常美好——事实上，这是唯一的严肃回报，因为它让你觉得“我成功了！我没有被孤立！” [...] 但另一方面，有一种巨大的压力迫使你重复自己，去做更多大家都喜欢的事情。我无法做到这一点——我没有足够的热情去推动那些对我来说已经熟悉的项目 [...] 但与此同时，我也确实感到一种内疚，因为没有做观众显然希望我做的事情，仿佛我“抛弃了我的观众”。实际上，我宁愿不去感受这种内疚，所以我尽量避免让自己陷入可能引发这种情绪的情境。
这段话出自伊诺拒绝加入一个以他作品为主题的邮件列表的回信。
在我二十岁出头的时候，我几乎每周都会在舞台上表演我写的内容。我会在书店、剧院、夜总会和教堂里朗读——无论哪里邀请我。这样做了大约一两年后，我注意到我的写作变得更加拘谨了。我开始写出符合人们期待的声音。
这并不奇怪：每当我尝试一个新的方向，写出一些我觉得真实的东西时，观众会立即给出直觉性的反应。“这样可以吗？”“不行。” 我就像斯金纳实验中的鸽子，每次写出让文学观众不感兴趣的内容时，都会感受到一种电击般的打击。我会表达出一个颤抖的、尚未成熟的想法，结果人们会在句子中途站起来，离开房间。
几年之后，我已经成功地将自己训练到每当脑海中浮现一首诗，而它偏离到我知道会在舞台上让我受伤的区域时，胸口就会感到一丝压迫感。于是我避开了那些地方——转向了共鸣。社会的奖赏与惩罚已经深深嵌入我的脊椎。
即使在我不为观众写作时，我也努力不让这些期望左右我的创作。他们的期望已经成为我的期望。而这让我很难追随自己的思想，跟随它们想要去的方向。
我曾经喜欢说，写作是一种探索和扩展内心世界的工具。但现在，我已经不再这样做了。每当我内心那个渴望真诚的声音冒出来时，它就会对我大喊：“你这个懦夫！告诉他们——” 但我却用棍子狠狠敲打它的头，把它压回我的肚子里。
三
正是在这个时候，我第一次去了约翰娜的公寓。这个夜晚，我在《寻找爱丽丝》中提到过，是我即将前往美国进行我的第一次（也是迄今为止唯一一次）朗读巡演的前三天。我当时的心境是这样的：
显然，我已经痴迷了她一年半的时间，这是我们两人都心知肚明的。而此刻，我终于被带进了她的卧室——一个堆满书、墙上靠着未完成画布的房间。我决定，这是个合适的时机来谈谈我对自己的羞愧感，以及我生活中的失控状态。
能够不再自我审查，让思绪自由流淌，是一种极大的解脱——我越是表现出自己的怪癖和“错误”，约翰娜的好奇心似乎就越深。这与我之前面对的观众形成了鲜明的对比。
十天后，我坐在沃尔瑟姆一栋公寓外的楼梯上，看着风中滚过的邓肯甜甜圈空杯。巡演结束了，我感觉自己像一场车祸后的残骸。我记得当时坐在那里，在脑海中摆弄着一首诗的一个诗节。那些滚动的杯子最终进入了我的诗中，我称它们为“被剥离的尖叫”——无论那意味着什么。我想，应该不是什么好东西。
我与约翰娜交谈的时间还不到十个小时，我不确定她是否还想再见到我，但与她交谈时，我感到前所未有的自由。在舞台上，我能说的话和我在她面前能说的话之间的差距，让我在整个巡演期间每晚都感到虚伪。我希望我的写作也能如此无拘无束，希望我的思想能够像与她交流时那样自然展开。但我知道，或者我觉得自己知道，在我为自己创造的世界里，我无法做到这一点。我觉得没有杂志会允许我探索我需要探索的内容（事实上，也确实是在这个时候，他们开始拒绝我的投稿），我也无法想象观众会喜欢我正在思考的东西。
当你发现自己处于这样一种境地——唯一保持地位的方式就是自我审查——你会怎么做？我花了好几个月才接受了这个显而易见的答案，但对我来说，唯一的答案只能是：退出。我会拒绝所有的邀请。
接下来的七年里，除了约翰娜，我没有向任何人展示过我写的东西。人们无法理解我的选择。当我试图解释为何陷入沉默时，朋友们投来忧虑的目光。他们说我“放弃了”。但在我看来，对于这种社交上的不便，我无能为力。我需要这些年的时间，去熟悉当摆脱他人期望时，我的思想究竟想去往何方。我必须学会为自己写作，把纸张当作扩展思维的工具。而这是无法在观众面前完成的。
四
如果你为了取悦他人而写作，那便是一种背叛。你正在经历“观众俘获”的过程。这种说法——即为观众写作和为自己写作是相互对立的——是我内心恐惧的声音，也是常见的观点。我曾经真的这样认为。
但现在我不再觉得这完全正确了。共融式写作与自我写作之间的关系比这更为复杂。作家的需求与观众的需求之间常常存在冲突，但也可能有互助的关系。某个时刻适合的观众，在另一个时刻可能就不再合适。文学世界在我二十岁时释放了我，却在我二十三岁时开始扭曲我。
但有些观众就像约翰娜那样。他们是个体或群体，能够持续推动你的成长，他们感兴趣的不是某个特定版本的你，而是你自身的发展过程。他们会鼓励并支持当下那个探索中的、创造性的、不完美的你，而不是过去成就辉煌的那个你。这一点不仅适用于写作，在生活的方方面面都是如此。有些朋友、社群或雇主会限制你的个人成长，而另一些则会支持它。
尽管我们常谈论“个人与集体”的对立，仿佛这是世界的永恒真理，但实际上，也存在鼓励多样性与健康个体化的群体。
对我来说，这种模式的典型例子是巴亚卡俾格米人的歌唱团体。
巴亚卡俾格米人以其即兴多声部音乐闻名：一个人唱出主旋律，其他人则加入，即兴创作不同的旋律。参与者面临两种激励。首先，他们必须唱出能与整体和谐共鸣的内容；不能跑调，也不能强调不和谐的音程。但其次，他们也不能重复别人已经唱过的内容，否则就没有和声，整个作品也会变得乏味。
在这样的团体中，追求共鸣的动力同时也是追求差异、创新和惊喜的动力。集体成为每位歌手展开其旋律潜力的和谐背景。个体歌手通过自己的独特性增添惊喜，并让歌曲继续下去，而他们的贡献又成为其他人发挥的基础。他们将个人与集体之间的张力转化为一种创造力。这之所以可能，是因为如果歌曲变得束缚人，或者有人以阻碍他人的方式歌唱，他们都可以随时退出。
对我来说，一个重要的转折点是意识到博客写作也是如此运作的，至少是我喜欢的那部分博客世界。如果我回顾两年前、在我拥有“观众”之前写的东西，那些文章让我觉得不像现在的自己。受到核心读者期望的支持（这些期望是我在网上写作过程中发现的），我得以展现自己与众不同的地方。我对自己怪异的一面变得更加自在，也更加珍视我所处的独特领域。例如，仅靠我自己，我可能不会觉得在斯堪的纳维亚诗歌圈的那些年特别有趣，但当我与戴维和亚历克斯交谈时，我意识到我的诗歌岁月为我们的对话增添了价值。于是，我写了这篇文章。
全文总结：探寻共融写作与真实自我的平衡
总述
本文探讨了写作中“为观众写作”与“为自己写作”之间的复杂关系。作者通过自身的经历，揭示了在创作过程中如何平衡外界期望与内心真实表达的重要性，并指出某些支持性的观众或群体能够帮助创作者更好地实现自我成长。
分述
为观众写作的困境：作者回顾了自己早期的创作经历，发现为了迎合观众期待，他的写作逐渐变得拘谨和不自由。这种自我审查让他感到虚伪，甚至失去了对写作的热情。他意识到，一味迎合观众会限制个人思想的展开，最终导致创作失去灵魂。
为自我写作的探索：在与约翰娜的交流中，作者体验到了一种无拘无束的表达方式。这种自由感促使他决定退出公众视野，专注于为自己写作。在接下来的七年里，他只与约翰娜分享自己的作品，试图摆脱外界的束缚，重新熟悉自己的思维方向。
共融式写作的可能性：作者认为，为观众写作与为自己写作并非完全对立。某些观众或群体（如约翰娜、巴亚卡俾格米人的歌唱团体）能够支持创作者的个性化发展，鼓励他们探索未知领域。在这样的环境中，集体与个体之间的张力可以转化为创造力，推动双方共同成长。
博客写作的启示：作者将这一理念延伸到博客写作中，指出核心读者的支持让他能够更自由地展现真实的自我。通过与志同道合的人交流，他不仅加深了对自己的理解，也为创作注入了新的意义。
总结
写作既是一种自我表达的方式，也是一种与观众互动的过程。关键在于找到那些能够支持你探索自我的观众或群体，在共鸣与差异之间找到平衡。通过这种方式，创作者可以在满足集体需求的同时，保持个体的独特性，从而实现真正的自由与成长。
原文
Look for people who likes the illegible you of today, not your past achievements
This is the fourth part of the series “First we shape our social graph; then it shapes us.” Part two was “Scraping training data for your mind” (partly payalled), part three “A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find interesting people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox.” They can be read independently.
1.
In my early twenties, when I wrote mainly spoken poetry, I used to say that the words on the paper are not the poem. The words are more like programming code. The poem is what the words turn into when you run them in the compiler of an audience. The poem is a mood in a room, it is the possibility for certain types of conversations in the lobby afterward—grown men crying, thinking about their grandmas, or something like that. The crying is the poem.
When you think about writing in this way, what you do is not so much constructing sentences as extracting a latent possibility in the relationship with the audience. You try various phrases, notice the reactions, improvise a bit, and gradually you discover something in this dialogue between writer and audience that is bigger than what you could have done on your own.
The British comedian Jimmy Carr talks about this in a recent interview:
The audience is a genius. They know immediately, that’s funny, that’s not funny, that’s acceptable, that’s not acceptable. They make the call on all that stuff so you’re just like presenting stuff and going, “Is that okay? Is that all right?”
Carr says he spends five minutes every night trying new jokes, and most bomb, but a few are good, and after a year the audience has given green light on enough material for him to record a comedy special. One can almost say the special was latent in the audience.
If you look at transcriptions of the speeches of Martin Luther King, you can see this process, too—how the material grows on stage as he improvises night after night, reacting to the audience. The most famous example is, of course, when he tells the audience at the Lincoln Memorial in D.C. that he has a dream and Mahalia Jackson shouts, “Tell them about the dream, Martin!” and he moves the notes to the side and starts riffing, pulling on many of the images that he had developed on stage during the months prior.
I think of this way of writing as “communal,” and I partly view what I do on my blog in this way. Much of what I write (including this) is prompted by questions that others ask me, and the input that feeds my creative process often comes from people I’ve met through the blog—book recommendations I get sent, friends I’ve made, comments, and critiques that forces me to sharpen my thinking.
The writing is a product of the social graph summoned by the writing.
But as much as I love this communal aspect of writing, it is also something that I have come to fear. Love and fear: these two feelings coexist in my heart.
2.
The fear sounds a lot like Brian Eno:
Of course, it’s really wonderful to be acclaimed for things you’ve done - in fact it’s the only serious reward, because it makes you think “it worked! I’m not isolated!” [...] But on the other hand, there’s a tremendously strong pressure to repeat yourself, to do more of that thing we all liked so much. I can’t do that - I don't have the enthusiasm to push through projects that seem familiar to me [...] but at the same time I do feel guilt for ‘deserting my audience’ by not doing the things they apparently wanted. I’d rather not feel this guilt, actually, so I avoid finding out about situations that could cause it.
This is from an email where Eno turns down an invitation to an email list dedicated to his work.
In my early twenties, I performed what I read on stage nearly every week. I would read in bookshops and theaters, nightclubs and churches—wherever I was invited. After doing this for a year or two, I noticed that I had gotten more circumscribed in my writing. I had started to sound how I was expected to sound.
And little wonder: I would venture out in a new direction, something that felt true to me, and I would immediately get a visceral reaction from the audience. “Is that ok?” “No.” I was one of Skinner’s doves, getting an electric shock whenever I wrote things that literary audiences did not resonate with. I would reveal a trembling, half-finished thought and people would stand up mid-sentence and walk out of the room.
After years of this, I had successfully programmed myself to feel a slight pressure across my chest whenever a poem that was taking shape in my head veered into a region where I knew I’d be hurt on stage. And I steered away from that—toward resonance. The social rewards and punishments had worked themselves into my spine.
I struggled to keep the expectations from steering my writing even when I wasn’t writing for an audience. Their expectations had become mine. And this made it hard for me to follow my thoughts where they wanted to go.
I liked to say that writing was a tool to explore and expand your inner world. But now, I wasn’t doing that. When the voice inside me that wanted me to be authentic veered its head, it bellowed insults at me, ”You coward! Tell them—” But I whacked it in the head and stuffed it down into my belly.
3.
It was right at this point that I visited Johanna’s apartment for the first time. This night, which I mentioned in “Looking for Alice,” was three days before I would leave for my first (and so far only) reading tour in the US. Here’s the mood I was in:
Here I was, clearly having been obsessed with her for one and a half years, which we both knew, and finally, I was being led into her bedroom, a room strewn deep with books and half-finished canvases stacked against the walls, and I decided that this was the right time to talk about how ashamed I was with myself, and how out of control my life was.
It was such a relief to not censor myself, to let my thoughts flow where they wanted to flow—the more idiosyncratic and “wrong” I was, the deeper Johanna’s curiosity seemed to become. It was like the inverse of the audiences I had submitted myself to.
Ten days later, I was sitting on the stairs outside an apartment in Waltham looking at empty cups from Dunkin’ Donuts rolling past in the wind. The tour was over and I felt like a car crash. I remember playing around with a stanza of a poem in my head as I sat there. The rolling cups made it into the poem and I called them “divested screams,” whatever that means. Nothing good I suppose.
I had talked to Johanna for less than ten hours, and I wasn’t sure if she’d want to see me again, but I felt so unfettered when I talked to her. The distance between what I could say with her and what I allowed myself to say on stage made me feel false every night on the tour. I wanted to be unfettered in my writing, I wanted my thoughts to unfold like they did with her, but I knew, or felt I knew, that I couldn’t do that in the world I had made for myself. I felt like no magazines would allow me to explore what I needed to explore (and indeed, they did start to turn down my pitches right around this time) and I couldn’t imagine that audiences would like what I was thinking, either.
What do you do when you find yourself in a situation like that—where the only way to cling to your status is to censor yourself? It took me a few months to accept the obvious answer, but for me, it could only be: you quit. I would turn down all offers.
What followed was seven years when I didn’t show what I was writing to anyone but Johanna. People couldn’t understand this choice. When I tried to explain why I went silent, friends gave me worried looks. They said I had “given up.” But there was, as far as I could tell, nothing to do about this social inconvenience. I needed those years to familiarize myself with where my thoughts wanted to go when free from the expectations of others. I had to learn to write for myself, using the paper as a vehicle to expand my thought. I couldn’t do that with an audience.
4.
If you write to please others, you are selling out. You are in the process of audience capture. This way of talking, which is how the fear in me talks, is common—as if writing for an audience and writing for yourself are at odds with each other. I really used to feel like that.
But I no longer think that it is quite right. The relationship between communal writing and self-writing is more complex than that. There is often conflict between the needs of the writer and the needs of the audience. But there can also be mutuality. An audience that is right at one time might be wrong at another. The literary world unleashed me when I was twenty and began distorting me at 23.
But some audiences are like Johanna. Individuals or groups that enable continual unfolding, who are interested not in a particular version of you, but the process of you. People who will encourage and enable the searching, creative, illegible you of today, rather than the polished you of your past achievements. This is true in all walks of life, not just writing. Some friends, communities, and employers limit your personal unfolding. Others support it.
Though we talk about “the individual vs the collective,” as if that dichotomy is an eternal truth about the world, there exist groups that encourage divergence and healthy individuation.
The archetypal example of this pattern for me is Bayaki pygmy song groups.
The Bayaki pygmies are famous for their improvised polyphonic music: one person sings a melody, and then the others join in improvising different melodies on top. There are two incentives the participants face. First, they must sing something that harmonizes with and supports the group as a whole; they can’t sing out of key, or emphasize dissonant intervals. But second, they can’t sing the same thing as anyone else, either, because then there is no harmony, and the whole thing is boring.
In a group like this, the drive for resonance is also a drive for divergence, reinvention, and surprise. The collective becomes the harmonic background against which each singer unfolds their melodic potential. The individual singers pull from their idiosyncrasies to add surprises and keep the song going, and what they add becomes the context for others to do the same. They turn the tension between individual and collective into a generative force. This is possible because they can all walk away if the song becomes confining, or if someone is singing in a way that holds the others back.
The big turning point for me was realizing that this is how blogging works too, or at least the part of the blogging world I like. If I look back at the things I wrote two years ago, before I had an “audience,” the essays strike me as less me. Supported by the expectations of my core readers, which I have found by writing online, I have been able to unfold what is different in me. I’ve grown more comfortable in my strangeness, and more fond of the provinces I inhabit. I wouldn’t have found my years in the Scandinavian poetry scene particularly interesting on my own, for example, but when I talk to Davey and Alex, I realize my poetry years add something to our dialogue. So I wrote this.