A Few Words on Chattel and Cattle

I don't claim to be an expert on the writing process. I'm only beginning what I hope will be my future career. But I can say that from my experience now, I would guess that about 40% of writing is unconscious. This is why Roland Bathes' "The Death of the Author" makes sense, I think-- people always want to ask authors "Did you intend this? Did you intend that?" Heck, I've been asked that question on numerous occasions in my high school workshop. Half the time the answer was no-- but I can't convince myself that that actually matters. Once a connection is on the paper, it's on the paper. Who cares what the author intended, really? It's always very interesting to talk to the person who wrote a book, but the act is comparable to having a conversation with the parents of someone you like and respect-- it's always interesting to see how a being was formed or created, but I don't feel like the identity of a book or story or poem or essay should be tied inextricably to the person who wrote it.

Here is what I think may have happened: LePan might have been trying to think of a word for mongrels in factory farms. He had been thinking about factory farming. The word "cattle" had been floating around in his head. Because the word was somewhere in what Freud would refer to, I think, as the foreconscious (I'm only Freudian when it's convenient) the word "chattel" suggested itself easily. A mental path had been paved for it, as it were.

For me, a large part of the writing process is having someone point out to me the unconscious connection I've made, at which point I can harness it and use it to my own advantage. These unconscious connections occur frighteningly often-- for me, anyway-- these intuitive leaps from one word to another, sentences which don't seem to belong but just "feel right". The advent of the word "chattel" in animals may well have been dependent on a similar phenomenon.

Not very well thought out. I need sleep; sorry.