Giddy Full Grown Men

Nerds get excited over what will seem to most people trivial things. Our Star Wars fans seem overly obsessive from time to time. But when a nerdy guy meets a nerdy girl who finds his Chewbacca imitation endearing, he knows he's found the one. Today i discovered a word that has troubled me for a long time, though i could not express it, for i did not know it. And in the same way our Star Wars guy gets giddy and bellows in the tongues of men and aliens, so i too now am at last bellowing the word diachronic.

My Greek friends will doubtless notice the distinguishable "dia" and "chronic." What excites me is the combination, and by extension, that the word expresses something not often regarded in much of my readings. So far as the word is used in English dia means 'through' or 'during' and chronic means 'time.' Fortunately, in my reading today, it was applied to an Aristotelian spiel concerning another Greek word 'akrosia,' which deals with whether a person errs regardless of having a right judgment. You've heard of 'know one errs knowingly.' Well yeah...

But my interest in diachronic as a word at present is tied immediately to the activity of the psyche. In particular, with the sporadic psychological activity of an author of literature. I want an account of what goes on in an authors mind diachronically, during the time that he writes during a particular sitting, or, at the various times he sits. Can we study this scientifically or is it forever bound to the subjective realm?

I have read nothing on this subject, nor have i heard it addressed in hermeneutical discussions. It's almost like our ignorance of the subject renders a hush upon the academic community. I partially think the cause a fear of what would result if we discovered any serious implications of diachronic activity. For example, authorial consciousness toward particular ends, or toward aesthetic accomplishments within a given text might fall to the wayside--and with them centuries of shoddy secondary criticism.

We would, after many years of its absence, have to formulate criteria for why we can say an author is or isn't conscious of what he writes, or whether he was conscious at one moment and lost consciousness later, or whether for that matter he was conscious at all. Critics say "this is what this author intended" without ever having asked the question "did he intend this at all" in the first place. It's a classic cart in front of the horse scenario. We need a universally applicable methodology for determining authorial consciousness, and i have the gut feeling that we can, with the help of psychology and philosophy of language, come up with a scientifically verifiable model.

I'm not proposing an alternative to authorial intent, saying that all authors write willy-nilly. Obviously, that's ridiculous. But why to the contrary have people not discussed the equally willy-nilly conception that authors are overtly intentional?

We've all experienced the sensation where a few years ago we said something and only now we would say that we are beginning to understand what we meant. As a point of analogy, i can't see why what happens when speaking might not also happen when writing.

Maybe i'm wrong. Or maybe i'm reading all the wrong books. In any case, somebody's gotta start saying something.

That's all i have to say about that...

the K.H.