I was at a training day last week run by the wonderful and impossible-to-praise-too-highly Royal Literary Fund.1 The training was for professional writers who might then go on to work with groups of people recovering from psychiatric illness, using the reading of carefully chosen texts and the participants’ own subsequent writing as tools towards fostering their recovery. The very first exercise we were asked to do on the training day was to write down, in a few words, why we wanted to do this work. I wrote ‘Because Making Meaning Matters’. I confess I felt rather smug about it. I do love a bit of alliteration in the morning.
The day whirled by, with huge amounts of stuff to take in and consider. It was only on the train back home that I was in a position to draw breath and think. And that was when I found myself being uncomfortably forced to address a rather awkward question - what precisely did I mean by that rather slick strapline? Does it really carry any more weight than Sky TV’s current nonsensical ‘Believe in Better’ slogan?2 I hoped so, I felt it did, but I needed to tease out the threads to understand more clearly what I was trying to get at.
The first element is about mental health, or the lack of it. Very simplistically, it seems to me that a number of the difficulties suffered by those with psychiatric problems are of the drought or deluge variety. That is to say, the individual either feels that there is absolutely and utterly no meaning in their life - for which the shorthand word is depression - or else they get caught, stuck in a carapace of rigid behaviours which blinkers their vision and stops them being able to conceive of a different, less harmful way of being.
So that’s one thread - the possibility of providing those recovering from psychiatric illness with different ways of viewing the world through reading what others have said and, even more significantly, through seeing what they themselves write in response.
Human beings are above all meaning-making animals. As well as the epithet home faber - man the tool user - I would like to suggest homo fabricator - man the maker. I step very gently here. I realise that for many any meaning that may reside in the world is something to be uncovered rather than made - that the maker, for them, is the Maker - and, with deep reservations about organised religion in any form, I of course respect such a view. It’s not a view I hold, though. For me, human beings are just one species amongst the many that throng our small planet, although a species with some very distinctive quirks (including, though I’ll not dwell on it here, the incipient obliteration of the very environment on which it depends - I mean to say, really??!). The quirk I’m most concerned with here, of course, is our strange drive to make meaning. I must say here, though, that, just as much as I am not an adherent of any religion, I am also no professional philosopher - nor even, to be honest, anything approaching an amateur in that thorn-filled field. I come to these questions as a writer, through the medium and the experience of language. So here is the next thread to be untangled - what is meaning, and how do we make it?
That’s not a question which can be answered in a sentence, not even if that sentence were a lifetime long, but as writers it’s surely worth having a stab at what it is we are doing day in, day out, particularly when, as with the training I attended, we are looking to use writing as a medium to support others’ thinking and feeling. So here goes.
Taking homo fabricator - man the maker - as my starting point, then my next question, logically, was ‘Maker of what?’ Sticking with the idea of meaning, and drawing on my schooldays Latin took me to a fork in the road - fabricator significationis or fabricator interpretationis. They both can be translated into English as ‘maker of meaning’, but there is a massive difference between ‘signification’ and ‘interpretation’, and neither of them seems to me to cast light on what I’m groping for. Signification and interpretation both imply that there is something ‘out there’ to which we can point or whose nature we can reveal, as if the world were wearing a negligee which, if we’re really lucky, it might just slip off, to reveal itself in all its naked glory. As I said earlier, that’s a view which works for many - and has done for thousands of years - but it’s not what I’m trying to get to grips with here. So perhaps it was not ‘meaning’ at all which I needed to look for? Perhaps it’s what drives us to seek meaning? There is, it must be said, no shortage of possible drivers, with consciousness and language heading the queue. Can you have consciousness without language? Yes, obviously in one sense. All living things can be said to have consciousness, but are they aware of their consciousness, or is that awareness reserved for us, Shakespeare’s ‘poor bare forked animals’? And is that awareness not somehow coupled with the development of language, and does that development of language not require the creation of meaning?
It’s no easy thing, being a human being. We have all sorts of frailties and failings, frights and fears, and we deal with them in all sorts of ways, but always fundamentally, essentially, through language, through the shape that language can give to our experience. And that comforts us. So rather than privileging signification or interpretation as being of prime importance, I would like to posit the title of homo fabricator consolationis - man the maker of comfort.
And that brings me back to the original easy slogan which started this whole quest. Of course making meaning matters3 - putting together all those sharp-edged fragments of experience and building them into a pattern that means something. A pattern, a meaning, provides comfort and consolation, and those are some of a human being’s most basic needs, particularly when you are frightened, fraught and confused. And that’s what writing can do.
Find out more about the inimitable Royal Literary Fund here.
I have to say that I do, wholeheartedly, believe in better than Sky TV…
Of course, we must be constantly on the alert to the kind of meanings human beings ascribe to their actions - and the certainty that theirs is the only correct meaning is one of the most dangerous things in the world - but that is, you’ll be relieved to hear, a discussion for another time…