It is interesting that what we call an “analytic” is a breakdown not only of whether or not someone has “seen” your work—and therefore, especially if you are a writer (and in a common sense) has “seen” “you”—but how many people have seen it, from where were they looking, how long did they spend looking, did they “click through” you or your work, how many times did they look, did they share you or your work to be looked at by others, etc. etc. It is also interesting that when you google “define analytic,” you are given only the adjective sense of the word as it relates to either logic—“true by virtue of the meaning of the words or concepts used to express it, so that its denial would be a self-contradiction”—or linguistics—”(of a language) tending not to alter the form of its words and to use word order rather than inflection or agglutination to express grammatical structure.” Which I mention mostly because I like those sentences. All of this is interesting to me because I have always taken the noun analytic to mean either the rendering of, or the tool for the rendering of, the relationship between a number of elements, with an optional explanation of their significance(s). It would seem however, from common social practices, that it actually has much more to do with the desire for, and the anxiety around, being “seen.”
(As a note regarding the scare quotes I place around the word “seen” when I use it: I do not like to use it because it is ableist, and also (and this is tied up with its ableism) because it is not sufficient for portraying what I mean when I say it. As some of you who have read my writing might have noticed, I use the term “to apprehend,” not only because it is a better word for that which I usually mean, but (and because of this) it is a central concept in what I believe are crucial ethics and politics regarding how we live today. For more of these terms with no real analytic, plz refer to the bolded words in my previous post.)
I got caught on the word “analytic” because I realized I used the term “analysis” in a poem that I wrote as a memorial for the late Chinese photographer and poet Ren Hang; which was something I remembered I had done as I was searching through old posts on my wordpress blog while realizing that a) I would like to re-share that post and b) that there was something very satisfying about writing and self-publishing a great deal of work that very few people ever read, in that it allows one to create a sort of secret archive, which is a delicious sort of something to discover. In a practical sense, it provides for future content in the publishing of one’s work and in another, it sheds light on the lived embodiment of being a being for whom “being seen,” even (especially?) metonymically plays a crucial, existential role.
Relatedly, and probably the thing which primed the chain of associations that led me to this place, I found myself experiencing this feeling of being questionably apprehensible very recently when I wrote and published a short essay on the recent death of my mother, which to this day (I just checked my “analytics”) no one has yet read. What changes about that which we hold either dear and true and then translate into our craft, when that craft remains unapprehended by others? And why do we call that apprehensibility “sharing?” What is the difference between the effects of having written versus having been read? Besides the ten cents Medium sends me for the latter every quarter. I don’t really care about an answer so much as I care about the posing, or “holding open” of that question, and how that feels like the central act of attending to one’s own sense of whether or not one is “seen.”
And this is all to say, really, that I wrote a poem about Ren Hang and his craft shortly after his death by suicide in 2017, which I think “touches on” the thick prose above, but in a more lucid fashion. Content warning if you decided to surf to the link: there is some nudity in the photographs I’ve shared there.