We have been led up the garden path on the idea of the written word. That it’s a reminder. A storage device. A handy, non-volatile memory stick for the species. This is not just wrong; it is a catastrophic understatement of the most potent technology ever to infiltrate the human skull.
The great literary berserker, Northrop Frye, didn’t just nibble around the edges of this truth. He detonated it: “the written word is far more powerful than simply a reminder: it re-creates the past in the present, and gives us, not the familiar remembered thing, but the glittering intensity of the summoned-up hallucination.“
Let that sink in. Glittering intensity. Summoned-up hallucination.
We’re not talking recall. We’re talking necromancy(the practice of claiming to communicate by magic with the dead to learn about the future).
The Eye Conquered The Ear( And Changed Everything)
Plato knew this. Two thousand years before Marshall McLuhan told us “the medium is the message,” the old Greek troublemaker understood that writing wasn’t just a tool—it was a perceptual revolution.
Before writing, language lived in the ear. Stories were sung, wisdom was chanted, truth was what you could remember and repeat. The oral world was intimate, immediate, vanishing. Like breath.
Then came the alphabet.
Suddenly, language moved from the evanescent ear to the eternal eye. Words became objects. Thoughts could be frozen, examined, dissected. This wasn’t progress—it was mutation.
Plato, that paranoid genius, feared this shift even as he used it. He worried that writing would atrophy memory, that students would mistake the symbol for the truth. So what did he do? He made them study geometry before philosophy.
Why geometry?
Because geometry trains the eye to see patterns, to extract meaning from visual abstraction. Plato was building new neural pathways. He was teaching his students how to process reality through vision instead of sound.
He was hacking their brains for the written age.
What happens to a civilization when it shifts from ear to eye? What do we lose? What do we become?
Back to Frye’s bombshell: writing creates hallucinations.
When you read “The sun was setting over the battlefield,” you don’t recall a sunset. You don’t remember a war. Your brain generates a sunset that never existed. It conjures smoke and blood and dying light that are purely spectral—vivid, immediate, and utterly false.
This is the dark magic of text: it occupies your consciousness with someone else’s ghost.
The best writers know this. They’re not transcribing reality—they’re implanting visions. Proust doesn’t describe a madeleine; he makes you taste it. Cormac McCarthy doesn’t write about violence; he makes you flinch.
The written word doesn’t preserve experience—it manufactures it.
And the sucker punch is: this manufactured experience can be more real, more intense, more transformative than the original event. The “glittering intensity” Frye talks about? That’s the paradox. The copy exceeds the original. The map becomes more vivid than the territory.
The Medium Isn’t The Message, It’s The Metaphor( And The Metaphor Is A Drug)
Marshall McLuhan got the bumper sticker: “The medium is the message.” But Frye gives us the intravenous drip: “The Medium Is the Metaphor.”
The written word isn’t a taxi delivering a passenger (the “content”). It is the landscape. It defines the journey. When you read “forest,” you don’t just remember a tree. Your mind, trained by centuries of this geometric, visual sorcery, conjures one. Your personal forest. With your shadows, your scent of pine, your hidden path.
The book is a script for a séance. The author is a distant ghost, whispering instructions. You, the reader, supply the haunted house, the sounds, the faces, the terror, the joy. The hallucination is a collaboration.
Memory softens edges. Writing sharpens them.
When words are written, they stop being carriers of information and start behaving like portals. You don’t recall the event. You enter it. You don’t remember the feeling. You experience its after burn.
This is why a letter hits harder than a voice note.
Why a manifesto outlives a speech.
Why contracts change civilizations and poems outlive kings.
The medium is not neutral.
The medium becomes the metaphor.
Writing turns time into a flat surface. Past, present, and future collapse into a single optical field. The eye doesn’t just read. It reconstructs. Line by line, neuron by neuron, hallucination by hallucination.
You are not consuming meaning.
You are co-creating it.
This is why a film adaptation at most times disappoints. It replaces your glittering, personal hallucination—yours alone, summoned from the unique chaos of your experience—with a director’s singular, concrete one. It’s a violation.
Why Writing Still Scares Power
Spoken words disappear. Written words linger. And lingering is a threat.
Empires fear archives.
Tyrants fear diaries.
Brands fear screenshots.
Because once words are written, they become independent agents. They travel without permission. They outlive their authors. They refuse to be unsaid.
A written sentence is a slow-burning fuse. You never know when it will ignite. Or who it will set on fire.
This is why manifestos matter. Why constitutions matter. Why brand stories matter.
Not because they inform. But because they form.
The Visceral Voltage Of Text
Great writing hurts. Period.
Not emotionally (though it does that too). Physically. When you read something that’s truly alive, your body responds. Heart rate changes. Pupils dilate. Stress hormones spike.
Because your brain can’t distinguish between a real threat and a vividly written one. Between an actual experience and a “summoned-up hallucination.”
This is the writer’s superpower: the ability to hack the nervous system through nothing but symbols on a page.
Joan Didion makes you nauseous. David Foster Wallace makes you exhausted. Toni Morrison makes you bleed.
They’re not writing about experiences—they’re inducing them.
Words aren’t just communication. They are transfusion. When done right, they inject foreign consciousness directly into your bloodstream.
Why This Matters Now More Than Ever
We’re in another perceptual revolution. The shift from text to image, from reading to scrolling, from depth to velocity.
TikTok isn’t the enemy. Neither is Instagram. They’re just the next mutation. The next way that medium shapes consciousness.
But here’s the rebellion: understanding the power of the written word in an image-saturated age is subversive. Wielding it with precision? That’s magic.
While everyone’s optimizing for the algorithm, you can be optimizing for the nervous system. While others chase eyeballs, you can be chasing minds.
Because Frye’s “glittering intensity” doesn’t come from production value or viral tricks. It comes from precision of language. From knowing that the right word, in the right order, can summon hallucinations that outlast empires.
Parting Thoughts
Writing is not a mirror held up to reality.
It is a lever inserted into it.
Once words are written, they stop belonging to the moment that birthed them and start shaping moments they were never meant to see. They outlive authority. They outthink intention. They out wait power.
Spoken words ask to be heard.
Written words insist on being reckoned with.
So if you are writing merely to record, you are playing with matches and calling it filing. Writing is not administration. It is architecture. It doesn’t remember the world. It quietly rebuilds it, sentence by sentence, reader by reader, hallucination by hallucination.
Choose your words the way engineers choose load-bearing columns. The structure will stand long after you’ve left the room.