Why I Publish

Most of the posts I write perhaps will not make a great deal of sense to many who read them. I will state now, for the record, that I do not write them for the many, but for the one, or perhaps two, who might consider them as one reader did: “Thanks a million for Broken Words, Broken Text. It’s clear as crystal, and it tells your readers (including me, of course) things they need to know. Bits and pieces of your ideas will have occurred to others, but you’ve dished up a deep and coherent vision of what’s going on (and I’d be surprised if that could be said of anyone else)”. from KD 7/11/2008

As to why I continue to publish with such a limited audience, it’s been stated before by the person whose works I still read the most in my life (and have continually since coming to consciousness awareness of his work in 1970):

“For more than one reason what I publish here will have points of contact with what other people are writing today. — If my remarks do not bear a stamp which marks them as mine, — I do not wish to lay any further claim to them as my property.

I make them public with doubtful feelings. It is not impossible that it should fall to the lot of this work, in its poverty and in the darkness of this time, to bring light into one brain or another — but, of course, it is not likely.

I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own.

I should have liked to produce a good book. this has not come about, but the time is past in which I could improve it.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Preface to PI, Cambridge, 1945

In Wittgenstein’s Shadow, perhaps, and still high, high on the mountain via “Code of the Herdsman” by Wyndham Lewis, I too feel like the time has indeed past in which I could improve my ideas. Now, all I can do is write them down as they are, and let the few for whom they will mean something use them as they see fit, for as long as I am able to do it.

Leane Roffey Line, PhD