Writing and Impermanence

In his book, Writing: Teachers & Children at Work (1983), Donald Graves remarks, regarding a student named John: John finally makes the major breakthrough on revision when he sees the words as temporary, the information as manipulable. Now he is able to deal with several drafts simultaneously (p.159). The context of this quote comes from a student who appears to be stuck on a draft, because he has ceased to see the possibilities of looking at information in different ways: turning the information around like it's a kind of cube. As a result, John experiences what Graves refers to as information "restlessness", and he is not able to do anything more with the draft except to tweak punctuation and so on.
   It's only later, when John glimpses the possibility to move or re-organize the information in his story, that he sees the temporary, impermanent nature of language itself. We see this evidenced in the following observations:
    
     a) John stops erasing, opting to 'cross out' words that don't make sense--which suggests that he is not attached to the look of the draft, and feels comfortable to revise the entire paper rather than covering up a few word
     b) more symbols are used to point between drafts, as information is inserted accordingly into new or different orders than before, thus characterizing what Lucy Calkins refers to as "going back and forth" in their writing (p.159)
   
This topic interests me, not only from the perspective of writing but from that of reading as well. I am thinking about how language moves from something static to something that is manipulable. Emerson seems to have hit on a point when he suggests that reading is a mirror of the soul, and thus books are not meant to be viewed as static in the first place, but I think there are deeper inroads to be made, such as how we can look at our own thinking in terms of extensions of what we read or write at a given time. Could the way we think (or the flexibility to do so) be determined by a dominant way in which we look at the functions of reading and writing--which are often related to metaphors of carving or inscribing information into fairly concrete, immovable shapes and forms? What if writing had a different metaphor, something akin to twirling a finger into the air?

The other aspect relates to seeing writing not as a form of inscribing but as brief flashes that can connect with other flashes in new ways. It doesn't need to have a logic or be locked into a particular category or genre. In fact, fiction and non-fiction can blend together in this way, as well as a cross-disciplinary blending of ideas.

Graves, Donald H. (1983 ) Writing: Teachers & Children at Work. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Educational Books