My experience of growing older has largely been to gain traction on progress, and learn (terribly slowly) to improve that traction, and identify and minimize whatever lessens or breaks the cycle of learning, and adapt those processes to problems in different domains. This progress (solving problems) not only occurs slowly, and the second-order progress (solving for solving problems) not only occurs slowly, but they both occur selectively, so that we are left with hard problems (first order), and hard types of problems (second order).
I sloppily transition the implied "I" into the explicit "we" so soon in this post because neither order of problem is unique to me, nor is the outcome described above. But even if we accept that we will solve easy problems, and then lose some momentum (though hopefully not altogether) on our way to solving gradually harder problems, then we can resign ourselves to the process, and proceed knowingly towards the task at hand. Maybe we are even lucky enough that such sober resignation will instill in us an appreciation for putting one foot in front of the other (in lieu of the quantum leaps forward we all dream of) - in other words, a work ethic.
Perhaps well and good, but I lament what is lost in this process.
Progress is seldom unequivocal, and many times we gain with one thing at the cost of another. In other words, progress is seldom as great as it seems, though it is hopefully still represents progress on balance. It is fairly uninteresting to make this point about the unseen effect of the aforementioned "first-order" type of process - i.e., we start locking the door to protect against burglars but then one day we lock ourselves out of the house on accident. But there are several other ways we can classify what we lose.
The hidden drawbacks of the "second-order" processes are troubling because their very nature makes they, themselves more likely to be hard problems. If it takes us time to learn to change our environment, then it is more difficult to intentionally and meaningfully change the way we go about changing our environment. If we were rational about this, we would step into the world of "second-order" problems with great reservation and care for this reason alone.
I really have two concerns, then.
The first is that we lose our aesthetic sensibility as we instill rationality onto our own thought processes. But, maybe losing our aesthetic sensibility is just part of growing older, regardless. I punt that one.
The second is the risk we run of ruining what is working in our life as we attempt to fix what is not working. The other, implied risks in that scenario are that it would be so difficult to know, until it is too late, and the possibility that it could not be undone.
Until now, I did not grasp how dispassionate, and distracted, and irritable, and unforgiving I have become, simply by being fixated on solving problems. This is both the unforeseeable and inevitable effect of learning to see problems everywhere, which I alone am responsible for. I learned to see problems everywhere when I discovered that I could fix [certain] problems systematically, but I did not have the foresight to see the dominoes that I was preparing to knock over, nor did I have the wisdom nor the grace to see that using a hammer on something besides a nail invites domain risk that should be considered carefully, and attempted carefully, and with low expectations, lest anomalous positive results be extrapolated with tragic results.
Unfortunately, the idea that fixing (or in this case, undoing) bad behavior requires only self-awareness, and some sort of internal passion is tragically incorrect. Separately, I have spent years, decades, my whole life, with myriad bad behaviors that I despise, that I would scream with rage for the persistence of - if only that same persistence hadn't dulled their company into something quietly tolerable. I have to remind myself that this is the world - that we all grow up with some deeply-ingrained habits that we will likely never shake, and that they will probably be a mixed bag. The rest is just a race of our ego versus our wisdom, though only our wisdom will stop before acting to ask, "What is lost?"
Maybe I can fix up the machine that got me here well enough to fly me home. I suppose that is the real test. Did I learn the right lesson - indeed, any lesson - from this?
Tuesday, December 24, 2013
Sunday, October 6, 2013
Musings on Hostels
In Amsterdam, in the spring of 2009, I woke up in my dormitory bed to the sound of puking happening in the room. It was not the intrusion of sound that woke me - this particular downtown hostel had been impossibly loud the entire evening and night, akin to trying to sleep on the couch in the middle of a party - so, it must have been the peculiarity of the sound that startled me awake. I had been exploring the city from early morning, when my overnight train rolled in from Berlin, until late evening, when the food and beer slowly dragged me under. I was laying down on my bed by 7pm, having resolved that this was perfect, because I could wake up in the middle of the night and see this place when people were "out" (I didn't know then that Amsterdam didn't work that way). But I only woke up long enough to turn away from the puking, which went all down the wall and the side of a trash can (so close!) on its way to the burnt orange carpet of the room, where it would no doubt later appear as nothing more than a speckled pattern, or, if a cleaning agent was used, maybe a slight local paleness.
Instead of staying the next night, as I had planned (and paid for), I checked out and hopped a train for Brussels, then a train for Bruges. The hostel there was much more to my liking, more my speed, containing a wonderful big open floor plan living/dining/computer area and wonderful cheap beds. In the evenings, the night's residents bantered in the communal area before heading out to dinner, or drinks. I met people from both the U.S. and Australia there that I would spend the next three days with.
In my particular 2009 travel experiences - both studying abroad as well as a winding path through northern and western Europe - I encountered few Americans. But I did twice, and I found myself apologizing for Americans - both the particular ones we had encountered, as well as my admission that their behavior was not uncommon amongst their type - to my foreign companions in both cases. The first occasion was in Warsaw, and doesn't justify recounting. The second occasion, in Bruges, involved my apology that an American would puke in a tiny hostel bathroom - a closet really - attached to the dorm room, in the middle of the night, while others were sleeping, and leave the smell there to hang in the air while everyone tried to go back to sleep, and wake up in the morning and offer no apology, but proceed without show of shame - which I will admit is something that may not be apparent but for particular personalities, such as the type that leans constantly against flirtation, as was the case here. And now, before the thought is lost to me - what are the chances that the Amsterdam puker was American? I'd say even odds, although there are obviously other cultures that are likely suspects - the Irish, let's say.
In Stockholm, too, we made new friends in the evenings, my German companion offering to pour Jagermeister directly down their throats. Upon their hesitation, he was compelled to demonstrate how it would work on himself, spilling it all down his front in the process (although plenty got to its intended destination), then standing with a mock grandiosity and drama that he was so good at, anywhere, anytime. For three nights, we laughed and drank and got into internecine squabbles in our own group, the product of time and place - a dim sense of importance, uniqueness, a profound gift of circumstance for our group. We were so close, and our relationships so intense, so brief, yet so real - and on some level we understood how rare it was, and how soon it would be over.
The most enduring hostel experience of all comes from Tallinn, Estonia, where our group of fifteen took the entirety of the third floor of a tall, skinny building in Old Town, complete with vaulted ceilings, serpentine staircases, and a table for eight around which fifteen of us crowded to play drinking games. When we arrived, we listened to our host's description of the top floor, and I ran up the stairs to take the sole upper bunk in a room full of single beds. I laid there long after everyone else was asleep that first night, peering towards the frosted windows that looked down the narrow street towards the city square. My sense of incomprehension was matched only by the sense of wonder. And never before or since that trip have I felt the pain so acutely of losing touch with particular people - the pain of meeting someone, becoming close friends, then finding the friendship vanished completely, a victim of time and circumstance, or in some cases, simply never meant to have been at all.
----------------------------------
The American hostel experience (at least, the one I have had) is the apotheosis of all I have described above, and this has never been illustrated better than last night. I retired to my hostel in the late evening to read up on my hiking destinations for the next couple days. Not five minutes later, I was joined on the couch (lots of other seating was free) by a haggard older man - the type who still buys brands aimed at teens and 20-somethings, because he believes it helps him to talk to this demographic - and sure enough, intent on talking to me (despite my alternative "status" to that noted above), about himself, about the beer I was drinking (Una Mas - not my cup of tea - I should have offered him the rest of it), about the book I was reading, ad nauseum. He successfully chased me away to my room. For the rest of the evening, night, and morning, I heard - with impossible regularity - sustained attacks of wheezing coughs, microwaving of food, and an aggressive clearing of esophageal phlegm. Each of these happened twenty or more times, throughout the night (each time woke me up), and of course, just outside my door, judging by the cacophonous nature of the sound. And where I had thought he had been drunk last night, I was surprised to find him of the same constitution this morning - bug-eyed, staggering slowly towards me, mouth hung open - even after twenty meals to sober himself up.
Of course, one experience does not fairly write a conclusion, or even reliably suggest a tendency, but my other handful of experiences in domestic hostels have all tended towards these sort of experiences, and not those of Europe, which although not uniformly positive (and of course there are a dozen more to tell that fall mostly somewhere in-between) do have the benefit of a satisfactory statistical sample size from which to ascertain that they are not by and large terrible places, or so frequented by terrible people as to render the same result.
Or, seeing as how that guy never went to sleep, maybe he just snuck in off the street?
Instead of staying the next night, as I had planned (and paid for), I checked out and hopped a train for Brussels, then a train for Bruges. The hostel there was much more to my liking, more my speed, containing a wonderful big open floor plan living/dining/computer area and wonderful cheap beds. In the evenings, the night's residents bantered in the communal area before heading out to dinner, or drinks. I met people from both the U.S. and Australia there that I would spend the next three days with.
In my particular 2009 travel experiences - both studying abroad as well as a winding path through northern and western Europe - I encountered few Americans. But I did twice, and I found myself apologizing for Americans - both the particular ones we had encountered, as well as my admission that their behavior was not uncommon amongst their type - to my foreign companions in both cases. The first occasion was in Warsaw, and doesn't justify recounting. The second occasion, in Bruges, involved my apology that an American would puke in a tiny hostel bathroom - a closet really - attached to the dorm room, in the middle of the night, while others were sleeping, and leave the smell there to hang in the air while everyone tried to go back to sleep, and wake up in the morning and offer no apology, but proceed without show of shame - which I will admit is something that may not be apparent but for particular personalities, such as the type that leans constantly against flirtation, as was the case here. And now, before the thought is lost to me - what are the chances that the Amsterdam puker was American? I'd say even odds, although there are obviously other cultures that are likely suspects - the Irish, let's say.
In Stockholm, too, we made new friends in the evenings, my German companion offering to pour Jagermeister directly down their throats. Upon their hesitation, he was compelled to demonstrate how it would work on himself, spilling it all down his front in the process (although plenty got to its intended destination), then standing with a mock grandiosity and drama that he was so good at, anywhere, anytime. For three nights, we laughed and drank and got into internecine squabbles in our own group, the product of time and place - a dim sense of importance, uniqueness, a profound gift of circumstance for our group. We were so close, and our relationships so intense, so brief, yet so real - and on some level we understood how rare it was, and how soon it would be over.
The most enduring hostel experience of all comes from Tallinn, Estonia, where our group of fifteen took the entirety of the third floor of a tall, skinny building in Old Town, complete with vaulted ceilings, serpentine staircases, and a table for eight around which fifteen of us crowded to play drinking games. When we arrived, we listened to our host's description of the top floor, and I ran up the stairs to take the sole upper bunk in a room full of single beds. I laid there long after everyone else was asleep that first night, peering towards the frosted windows that looked down the narrow street towards the city square. My sense of incomprehension was matched only by the sense of wonder. And never before or since that trip have I felt the pain so acutely of losing touch with particular people - the pain of meeting someone, becoming close friends, then finding the friendship vanished completely, a victim of time and circumstance, or in some cases, simply never meant to have been at all.
----------------------------------
The American hostel experience (at least, the one I have had) is the apotheosis of all I have described above, and this has never been illustrated better than last night. I retired to my hostel in the late evening to read up on my hiking destinations for the next couple days. Not five minutes later, I was joined on the couch (lots of other seating was free) by a haggard older man - the type who still buys brands aimed at teens and 20-somethings, because he believes it helps him to talk to this demographic - and sure enough, intent on talking to me (despite my alternative "status" to that noted above), about himself, about the beer I was drinking (Una Mas - not my cup of tea - I should have offered him the rest of it), about the book I was reading, ad nauseum. He successfully chased me away to my room. For the rest of the evening, night, and morning, I heard - with impossible regularity - sustained attacks of wheezing coughs, microwaving of food, and an aggressive clearing of esophageal phlegm. Each of these happened twenty or more times, throughout the night (each time woke me up), and of course, just outside my door, judging by the cacophonous nature of the sound. And where I had thought he had been drunk last night, I was surprised to find him of the same constitution this morning - bug-eyed, staggering slowly towards me, mouth hung open - even after twenty meals to sober himself up.
Of course, one experience does not fairly write a conclusion, or even reliably suggest a tendency, but my other handful of experiences in domestic hostels have all tended towards these sort of experiences, and not those of Europe, which although not uniformly positive (and of course there are a dozen more to tell that fall mostly somewhere in-between) do have the benefit of a satisfactory statistical sample size from which to ascertain that they are not by and large terrible places, or so frequented by terrible people as to render the same result.
Or, seeing as how that guy never went to sleep, maybe he just snuck in off the street?
Saturday, October 5, 2013
Musings on Myst, and a bonus link
Emily Yoshida reflects on the legacy of the computer game Myst:
http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/9713372/looking-back-game-myst-20th-anniversary
Much of the article wonders why these sort of games disappeared. Each of Myst's sequels saw fewer and fewer sales, and there were few, if any similar games from other studios that had any success to speak of.
There is a thread left disconnected - a speculative one on my part, but one that satisfies a certain view of the world that I believe to be robust. This is from the article:
"The story — which would eventually become so complex it would fill three companion novels — was almost an afterthought. "We're not game designers; we were place designers, so we just started drawing maps, and the maps kind of fueled the story," said Rand.
...
"It was this leapfrog kind of experience, where we would draw a building and say, 'What's in that building, and why is that in the building?' And it just so happened that it was much more satisfying as we built this space to start to build a story behind it. It wasn't necessary, but for some reason in our minds, if there wasn't a story, [the game] lost some kind of credibility."4 It seems ironic in 2013, as games are gaining critical legitimacy arguably because of their increasingly sophisticated narratives, to find out that the developers who had supposedly changed everything in 1993 had to force themselves to justify the addition of a narrative."
I think the answer is right there, like The Purloined Letter, hidden in plain sight. People didn't respond to Myst because of the story (for sure, I didn't, and I was obsessed - I ran off and created dozens of my own crude maps on paper of my own "worlds"). Myst was successful because people were responding to the aesthetic experience. The story is actually rather clunky (although I read all three of the novels and they were okay - especially the first one). But the aesthetic experience is remarkably rich (before you disagree, remember, this was at a time when CGI of this quality was rare). Not only were several worlds put onto the screen that people could explore on their own, but they weren't quite "right" - they were skewed, tinged with hallucinatory imagery - and I think the reason is right up above in that quote - they built the worlds to trigger an aesthetic response first, and added a story second. It sounds like I could even reference Malcolm Gladwell's article on Steve Jobs, where he advocates for the "tinkerer" over the "inventor" - artists have always overwhelmingly been tinkerers:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/14/111114fa_fact_gladwell
I suspect that all the games that followed Myst followed an inventor's mindset - setting out to recreate Myst, or a "better Myst", and not fumbled towards instinctively by a couple of "place designers" who didn't know what they were building. I am tempted to go so far as to say that Myst works because the formula could not be mistaken for something calculated.
One more thing worth mentioning - I think the music helped, too - so much so that I wonder what Brian Eno thinks of it, since it seems to confirm his theory of the role of ambient music in enhancing the experience of "place".
On an unrelated note: lost with effortless ease to the arcana of the past, Dewey Street Reviews was a forum to post reviews of anything and everything. It promised a million jokes within the framework of its single joke, and it died a quiet death after two reviews. It deserved more - this is my mistake alone. Regardless, Ted Wilson gives exercise to the same joke (and I'm sure plenty of others have before and since, as well - but I found this one) at The Rumpus:
http://therumpus.net/2013/09/ted-wilson-reviews-the-world-200/
http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/9713372/looking-back-game-myst-20th-anniversary
Much of the article wonders why these sort of games disappeared. Each of Myst's sequels saw fewer and fewer sales, and there were few, if any similar games from other studios that had any success to speak of.
"The story — which would eventually become so complex it would fill three companion novels — was almost an afterthought. "We're not game designers; we were place designers, so we just started drawing maps, and the maps kind of fueled the story," said Rand.
...
"It was this leapfrog kind of experience, where we would draw a building and say, 'What's in that building, and why is that in the building?' And it just so happened that it was much more satisfying as we built this space to start to build a story behind it. It wasn't necessary, but for some reason in our minds, if there wasn't a story, [the game] lost some kind of credibility."4 It seems ironic in 2013, as games are gaining critical legitimacy arguably because of their increasingly sophisticated narratives, to find out that the developers who had supposedly changed everything in 1993 had to force themselves to justify the addition of a narrative."
I think the answer is right there, like The Purloined Letter, hidden in plain sight. People didn't respond to Myst because of the story (for sure, I didn't, and I was obsessed - I ran off and created dozens of my own crude maps on paper of my own "worlds"). Myst was successful because people were responding to the aesthetic experience. The story is actually rather clunky (although I read all three of the novels and they were okay - especially the first one). But the aesthetic experience is remarkably rich (before you disagree, remember, this was at a time when CGI of this quality was rare). Not only were several worlds put onto the screen that people could explore on their own, but they weren't quite "right" - they were skewed, tinged with hallucinatory imagery - and I think the reason is right up above in that quote - they built the worlds to trigger an aesthetic response first, and added a story second. It sounds like I could even reference Malcolm Gladwell's article on Steve Jobs, where he advocates for the "tinkerer" over the "inventor" - artists have always overwhelmingly been tinkerers:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/14/111114fa_fact_gladwell
I suspect that all the games that followed Myst followed an inventor's mindset - setting out to recreate Myst, or a "better Myst", and not fumbled towards instinctively by a couple of "place designers" who didn't know what they were building. I am tempted to go so far as to say that Myst works because the formula could not be mistaken for something calculated.
One more thing worth mentioning - I think the music helped, too - so much so that I wonder what Brian Eno thinks of it, since it seems to confirm his theory of the role of ambient music in enhancing the experience of "place".
On an unrelated note: lost with effortless ease to the arcana of the past, Dewey Street Reviews was a forum to post reviews of anything and everything. It promised a million jokes within the framework of its single joke, and it died a quiet death after two reviews. It deserved more - this is my mistake alone. Regardless, Ted Wilson gives exercise to the same joke (and I'm sure plenty of others have before and since, as well - but I found this one) at The Rumpus:
http://therumpus.net/2013/09/ted-wilson-reviews-the-world-200/
Calming Down
When I'm in a familiar place, I'm almost always fine. I can feel the center of my ego, exactly where I stand, and I feel no disconnect between my inner desire and what I find my physical self actually, subsequently doing.
Elsewhere, which is to say, those places where I am not familiar, I am not at peace - regardless of whether I am enjoying myself. There is a disconnect between my heart and my body - my feet, my mouth, my ability to maintain patience, clarity, focus. My actions are rushed - all I feel are the compulsions (indeed, those I have trained myself to possess) to successfully complete objectives. In this, I experience a sort of out-of-body experience, where I do things too quickly, or too soon, or things I have not yet consciously decided to do.
This happens reliably on vacation, which primes it, I think, by being composed of the absurd contradiction of "hurrying to relax". I only have a week, I have a drive to make, and logistics to coordinate, and things to check off a master list - what the trip is made of, what I hope to go to actually do. When I'm not careful, I stride almost breathlessly through hikes that I intended to be relaxing (dare I hope, transcendental) experiences. All this, because I cannot balance the achieving mindset - necessary to plan it all, to leave, and travel, and arrive - with the mindset of the self - which is in service to nothing else.
The distance between them is not easy to traverse. But it helps to have some sunshine, a good coffee, people and scenery and music.
Wish me luck!
Elsewhere, which is to say, those places where I am not familiar, I am not at peace - regardless of whether I am enjoying myself. There is a disconnect between my heart and my body - my feet, my mouth, my ability to maintain patience, clarity, focus. My actions are rushed - all I feel are the compulsions (indeed, those I have trained myself to possess) to successfully complete objectives. In this, I experience a sort of out-of-body experience, where I do things too quickly, or too soon, or things I have not yet consciously decided to do.
This happens reliably on vacation, which primes it, I think, by being composed of the absurd contradiction of "hurrying to relax". I only have a week, I have a drive to make, and logistics to coordinate, and things to check off a master list - what the trip is made of, what I hope to go to actually do. When I'm not careful, I stride almost breathlessly through hikes that I intended to be relaxing (dare I hope, transcendental) experiences. All this, because I cannot balance the achieving mindset - necessary to plan it all, to leave, and travel, and arrive - with the mindset of the self - which is in service to nothing else.
The distance between them is not easy to traverse. But it helps to have some sunshine, a good coffee, people and scenery and music.
Wish me luck!
Sunday, September 8, 2013
Writing's Inner and Outer Circles
About two years ago, I took up writing as a hobby - a concerted effort to do something with purpose that I had long done haphazardly, randomly, a pleasure where it had fit, in several different corners of life - a bad habit of unreliable blogging, a worse habit of adding flourishes to essay-writing in college. It worked for what I needed, offering me an outlet and an excuse to give myself more deliberate quiet time to myself, something I would probably never bother doing for its own sake.
And so, writing's inner circle flourished, my mind segregated for a few hours a week into a place where I could indulge my creative impulses to follow ideas with a persistence that my wayward and flitting imagination had never managed, not least because my rote memory has always been so poor, my wayward musings mostly carrying off into nothingness on long walks when I was lucky, or while driving to work when I was not lucky.
The first thing I wrote was a long and cliched semi-veiled autobiography of my 20's that allowed me to explore connections and themes in a persistent manner that I, myself, had lived through. In a formless third-person narrative, at first derivative of styles and techniques of myriad writers I admired, I sketched the subset of my own prior mental states that have stood the test of time - the feelings that I now feel to have been most true, most lasting during that time. In the space of a hundred-and-fifty pages, I wrote and re-wrote, a thousand pages or more, perhaps. (Pages's flashback feature intrigues me - perhaps some day I will go read random passages long lost to re-edit, to find the things I should never have discarded.) However, for my concerns with my own writing, editing is not the most acute. I rather trust my sense of detecting terrible, lifeless writing, and if acting as my own editor has done anything, it has given me adequate chance to hone this one skill.
On learning to write well, there is a hierarchy that I perceive as going something like this:
1) Always tell the truth
2) Write sentences well
3) Write paragraphs well
4) Write stories well
"Well" is conveniently vague, but requires economy, and consistency, and avoidance of contradiction, and a respect for theme second only to the respect for truth.
And of course, someone can get caught up on any one or more of these things, but it would not be surprising to find out that there are plenty of writers who can write a perfectly serviceable sentence, but for whom this skill does not proceed to the ability to write entire paragraphs or stories. One problem I have encountered on these levels is the problem of pacing, and I must admit that I do not think this problem is the final problem normally encountered moving up the hierarchy, nor is it an easy problem to solve in and of itself. But I am starting to get a sense that pacing is an issue of avoiding doing certain things wrong. In other words, it is not necessarily the case that the pacing problem is one of pursuing "immaculate" pace. You just don't want to be jarring in a way that detracts from the story. Sometimes I wonder if all of sentence breaks, and paragraph breaks, and the choice to narrate or tell in dialog, is primarily a choice of pacing, but I could never do without any of those things, for my pacing is largely uncontrolled and needs all the help it can get.
And how does a person write a story well? I haven't even begun to grasp. But themes are required, and real people, and real things must happen on some level, that someone, somewhere, must be capable of caring about. From an inner circle perspective, it is here that I fall back on the fact that I care about these things, at least while a story appears to hold some theme or themes that I believe are more than the sum of the words on the page. And the fact that sometimes a story does until it doesn't - the themes just fall right out the bottom of the thing when you change it the wrong way - is both fascinating and terribly disheartening. What I have found is that by paying attention to these things, I force myself to maintain economy in a story - which I act as if is superior to the tenet of making sure something happens, a quality that I myself have already suggested has to occur - so now I have contradicted myself, haven't I? I suppose this is most appropriate, and should not be surprising, though, given that the majority of my stories also come to life and ground to a frozen half-finished state by such a similar order of events - a conviction that something has to happen, which gives life to an early form, a cleansing of form and content in order to establish one or more feelings which I believe the story requires in order to amount to something more than words, and a paralysis in this state when I find myself unable to add anything further without destroying my carefully-constructed diorama of melty feelings.
How does a person know the outer world of writing - the impression that other readers will be given and the reaction they will have to a story? I have found alarmingly little talk of this among writers. Mostly, I think they learn to accept what is unknowable, and learn to have a thick skin, and live with it for the paychecks, or for whatever else the outside world gives them that must inextricably bring along the outer world of criticism and varied feedback.
But what do I really know about this world as a whole? Is it common for others never to release their work for their concern with these unknowns? Is it common to wonder if unforeseen feedback - whether it feel ostentatiously good, bad, or indifferent - will color, damage, even destroy the authorial mechanisms by which stories are protected from undesired influence?
What does it mean for someone whose opinion you value to get something else from your writing than you intended, and make that thing known to you? Can feedback from the outer circle be constructive? Is making it constructive a separate set of skills from the inner circle feedback mechanism? Which is more likely to be useful, and which is more likely to produce neurosis, or paralysis in the writing mechanism?
Perhaps it is my nature to do everything possible to preserve the rare things that work, and so I am simply required to be fearful.
And so, writing's inner circle flourished, my mind segregated for a few hours a week into a place where I could indulge my creative impulses to follow ideas with a persistence that my wayward and flitting imagination had never managed, not least because my rote memory has always been so poor, my wayward musings mostly carrying off into nothingness on long walks when I was lucky, or while driving to work when I was not lucky.
The first thing I wrote was a long and cliched semi-veiled autobiography of my 20's that allowed me to explore connections and themes in a persistent manner that I, myself, had lived through. In a formless third-person narrative, at first derivative of styles and techniques of myriad writers I admired, I sketched the subset of my own prior mental states that have stood the test of time - the feelings that I now feel to have been most true, most lasting during that time. In the space of a hundred-and-fifty pages, I wrote and re-wrote, a thousand pages or more, perhaps. (Pages's flashback feature intrigues me - perhaps some day I will go read random passages long lost to re-edit, to find the things I should never have discarded.) However, for my concerns with my own writing, editing is not the most acute. I rather trust my sense of detecting terrible, lifeless writing, and if acting as my own editor has done anything, it has given me adequate chance to hone this one skill.
On learning to write well, there is a hierarchy that I perceive as going something like this:
1) Always tell the truth
2) Write sentences well
3) Write paragraphs well
4) Write stories well
"Well" is conveniently vague, but requires economy, and consistency, and avoidance of contradiction, and a respect for theme second only to the respect for truth.
And of course, someone can get caught up on any one or more of these things, but it would not be surprising to find out that there are plenty of writers who can write a perfectly serviceable sentence, but for whom this skill does not proceed to the ability to write entire paragraphs or stories. One problem I have encountered on these levels is the problem of pacing, and I must admit that I do not think this problem is the final problem normally encountered moving up the hierarchy, nor is it an easy problem to solve in and of itself. But I am starting to get a sense that pacing is an issue of avoiding doing certain things wrong. In other words, it is not necessarily the case that the pacing problem is one of pursuing "immaculate" pace. You just don't want to be jarring in a way that detracts from the story. Sometimes I wonder if all of sentence breaks, and paragraph breaks, and the choice to narrate or tell in dialog, is primarily a choice of pacing, but I could never do without any of those things, for my pacing is largely uncontrolled and needs all the help it can get.
And how does a person write a story well? I haven't even begun to grasp. But themes are required, and real people, and real things must happen on some level, that someone, somewhere, must be capable of caring about. From an inner circle perspective, it is here that I fall back on the fact that I care about these things, at least while a story appears to hold some theme or themes that I believe are more than the sum of the words on the page. And the fact that sometimes a story does until it doesn't - the themes just fall right out the bottom of the thing when you change it the wrong way - is both fascinating and terribly disheartening. What I have found is that by paying attention to these things, I force myself to maintain economy in a story - which I act as if is superior to the tenet of making sure something happens, a quality that I myself have already suggested has to occur - so now I have contradicted myself, haven't I? I suppose this is most appropriate, and should not be surprising, though, given that the majority of my stories also come to life and ground to a frozen half-finished state by such a similar order of events - a conviction that something has to happen, which gives life to an early form, a cleansing of form and content in order to establish one or more feelings which I believe the story requires in order to amount to something more than words, and a paralysis in this state when I find myself unable to add anything further without destroying my carefully-constructed diorama of melty feelings.
How does a person know the outer world of writing - the impression that other readers will be given and the reaction they will have to a story? I have found alarmingly little talk of this among writers. Mostly, I think they learn to accept what is unknowable, and learn to have a thick skin, and live with it for the paychecks, or for whatever else the outside world gives them that must inextricably bring along the outer world of criticism and varied feedback.
But what do I really know about this world as a whole? Is it common for others never to release their work for their concern with these unknowns? Is it common to wonder if unforeseen feedback - whether it feel ostentatiously good, bad, or indifferent - will color, damage, even destroy the authorial mechanisms by which stories are protected from undesired influence?
What does it mean for someone whose opinion you value to get something else from your writing than you intended, and make that thing known to you? Can feedback from the outer circle be constructive? Is making it constructive a separate set of skills from the inner circle feedback mechanism? Which is more likely to be useful, and which is more likely to produce neurosis, or paralysis in the writing mechanism?
Perhaps it is my nature to do everything possible to preserve the rare things that work, and so I am simply required to be fearful.
Friday, July 12, 2013
Choice
Several years ago, I asked my aunt - who has had professional success - to help me make a decision regarding school. I was considering transitioning from an undergraduate program directly into a graduate degree program, rather than graduating back into a full-time job. This situation can best be described, I think, as a matter of doubt leading to paralysis. Malcolm Gladwell recently had an interesting story to tell about this subject, much better than I can:
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2013/06/24/130624crbo_books_gladwell?currentPage=all
But I digress. My aunt and her husband agreed that higher degrees were not a matter of money so much as a matter of choice - the ability to broaden professional choice, both in the sense of a career path and the ability to find a job at any certain place and time that a person preferred.
I can't count the number of times I had by then changed my opinion on that subject - although I came to agree with even her narrow point only years after the conversation (I absorb ideas very slowly, for better or worse), and I have held this position ever since. However, the proposition implied by the question is no longer "in scope" to my current situation. Two things changed:
1) I no longer expect to be working as long, which changes the proposition of additional schooling from a discounted cashflow perspective, and
2) I have come to understand Product Management as a job where a history of job success can trump educational credentials
In my eventual agreement with her broader position, I had to come to understand why she assumed choice was more important to begin with. At the time, I had no such notion. (As much as people talk about the idea of "common sense", Voltaire stated all we need to know: "Common sense is not so common." Probably because our internal monologue gives us an undeserved illusion of ourselves as rationalists.)
Choice is important, I think, because the future is unknowable. We are always predisposed to underestimate the amount of change that lay ahead of us. When we "plan for the future", what we are more often doing is planning for the logical extrapolation of the present. It's all we can do, because we have no way of understanding the person we will become. We would better utilize the time to maximize our preparation for, tolerance of, and readiness to embrace whatever unexpected choices will become ours to make. For that matter, this is just as true on a daily basis as it is from one year, or even decade, to the next.
It occurred to me recently that this pursuit of greater choice describes the fundamental proposition of my life over the last year, and it includes the following things that I have found some success with:
- Time: Having true control of your time is the ultimate matter of choice in anyone's life. Most directly, I am learning to resist unwanted obligations on my time. The worst of these are the ones that recur, the ones that we don't choose, and the ones that are the result of obsolete decisions from our past. Further progress on my part will require greater bravery in resisting these "stickier" time obligations.
- Habit: I am trying to learn to break bad habits more effectively. This requires - among other things - letting certain habits through for a time. For instance, I have a habit of sitting in coffee shops as a way, primarily, of resetting my head from days or weeks spent thinking about work (more on that later). I'd prefer not spend money on something like coffee (or gas, for that matter), but it is clearly better than the alternative to me, which was that thoughts of work would consume whole days that they didn't need to.
- Health and Fitness: Eating better and getting adequate exercise so enhanced my energy levels and general day-to-day disposition that they equate directly, in my mind, to time saved.
- Honesty: Being honest - always and to everyone - so alleviates mental obligations of guilt and anxiety that when I learned to do it a few years ago, it felt equal to me to quitting a high-pressure job. More time saved.
- Credibility: This is an extension of the previous item and a lesson originating from my job that also applies to personal relationships. Only promise what you are sure you are capable of. Then try to exceed it. This is the glue of lasting, meaningful relationships, in both business and personal life, and people that understand the good nature of your character are capable of being conduits to your future choices in profound ways.
- Love: I was always sickened - as all children are - at the idea that love might be an obligation, something of weight that could be dropped and shattered if we fail to be attentive. Well, I finally see it. Love is only fully internalized when we see it as something we must take responsibility for, rather than something that we remain helplessly in (or out of) the thrall of. In the context of choice, love is the logical conclusion of credibility, since only the people that love us will fully respect and understand the choices we will make.
And a couple places where I need to do much better:
- Expectation: it can be difficult to reset expectations with people you have had long relationships with, whether they be family, friends, or a significant other. But in all cases, you do the best by that relationship to align the time you devote to what gives you the greatest enjoyment. I have realized how much time I devote to these relationships that I do not enjoy, and - more substantially - that do not do justice to the time I am devoting to that relationship. I owe it to them to reset how we relate to each other and how we spend our time together. (Again, ultimately solving for time, above all else.)
- Courage: so many of the aforementioned items give us additional time (and space), but it can be tempting (and easy) to retreat backwards from engaging with life. But what kind of choice is that? Philosophically, someone could easily describe this as an avoidance of choice, as a forfeiture of optionality. What could be worse than to strive for choice and then take a pass?
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2013/06/24/130624crbo_books_gladwell?currentPage=all
But I digress. My aunt and her husband agreed that higher degrees were not a matter of money so much as a matter of choice - the ability to broaden professional choice, both in the sense of a career path and the ability to find a job at any certain place and time that a person preferred.
I can't count the number of times I had by then changed my opinion on that subject - although I came to agree with even her narrow point only years after the conversation (I absorb ideas very slowly, for better or worse), and I have held this position ever since. However, the proposition implied by the question is no longer "in scope" to my current situation. Two things changed:
1) I no longer expect to be working as long, which changes the proposition of additional schooling from a discounted cashflow perspective, and
2) I have come to understand Product Management as a job where a history of job success can trump educational credentials
In my eventual agreement with her broader position, I had to come to understand why she assumed choice was more important to begin with. At the time, I had no such notion. (As much as people talk about the idea of "common sense", Voltaire stated all we need to know: "Common sense is not so common." Probably because our internal monologue gives us an undeserved illusion of ourselves as rationalists.)
Choice is important, I think, because the future is unknowable. We are always predisposed to underestimate the amount of change that lay ahead of us. When we "plan for the future", what we are more often doing is planning for the logical extrapolation of the present. It's all we can do, because we have no way of understanding the person we will become. We would better utilize the time to maximize our preparation for, tolerance of, and readiness to embrace whatever unexpected choices will become ours to make. For that matter, this is just as true on a daily basis as it is from one year, or even decade, to the next.
It occurred to me recently that this pursuit of greater choice describes the fundamental proposition of my life over the last year, and it includes the following things that I have found some success with:
- Time: Having true control of your time is the ultimate matter of choice in anyone's life. Most directly, I am learning to resist unwanted obligations on my time. The worst of these are the ones that recur, the ones that we don't choose, and the ones that are the result of obsolete decisions from our past. Further progress on my part will require greater bravery in resisting these "stickier" time obligations.
- Habit: I am trying to learn to break bad habits more effectively. This requires - among other things - letting certain habits through for a time. For instance, I have a habit of sitting in coffee shops as a way, primarily, of resetting my head from days or weeks spent thinking about work (more on that later). I'd prefer not spend money on something like coffee (or gas, for that matter), but it is clearly better than the alternative to me, which was that thoughts of work would consume whole days that they didn't need to.
- Health and Fitness: Eating better and getting adequate exercise so enhanced my energy levels and general day-to-day disposition that they equate directly, in my mind, to time saved.
- Honesty: Being honest - always and to everyone - so alleviates mental obligations of guilt and anxiety that when I learned to do it a few years ago, it felt equal to me to quitting a high-pressure job. More time saved.
- Credibility: This is an extension of the previous item and a lesson originating from my job that also applies to personal relationships. Only promise what you are sure you are capable of. Then try to exceed it. This is the glue of lasting, meaningful relationships, in both business and personal life, and people that understand the good nature of your character are capable of being conduits to your future choices in profound ways.
- Love: I was always sickened - as all children are - at the idea that love might be an obligation, something of weight that could be dropped and shattered if we fail to be attentive. Well, I finally see it. Love is only fully internalized when we see it as something we must take responsibility for, rather than something that we remain helplessly in (or out of) the thrall of. In the context of choice, love is the logical conclusion of credibility, since only the people that love us will fully respect and understand the choices we will make.
And a couple places where I need to do much better:
- Expectation: it can be difficult to reset expectations with people you have had long relationships with, whether they be family, friends, or a significant other. But in all cases, you do the best by that relationship to align the time you devote to what gives you the greatest enjoyment. I have realized how much time I devote to these relationships that I do not enjoy, and - more substantially - that do not do justice to the time I am devoting to that relationship. I owe it to them to reset how we relate to each other and how we spend our time together. (Again, ultimately solving for time, above all else.)
- Courage: so many of the aforementioned items give us additional time (and space), but it can be tempting (and easy) to retreat backwards from engaging with life. But what kind of choice is that? Philosophically, someone could easily describe this as an avoidance of choice, as a forfeiture of optionality. What could be worse than to strive for choice and then take a pass?
Sunday, January 27, 2013
Musings on The West
I would like to trace a course from what I call the "pastoral west", which exists in the imagined past of the present (maybe even more so the imagined past of the recent past?) and is largely devoid of historical reality, to what exists today, which, by definition, must consist of reality. And so, I am making two crossings - from past to present, and from what is imagined to what really exists. To me, it is most interesting to me to cross both distances simultaneously, since our sentiments of memory belong to the past, and neither the imagined present nor the real past carries as much aesthetic novelty.
I don't think I could find a better frame of reference to an especially important marker along the way than the subset of Don Stinson's paintings of the west that are intruded upon by the ruins of civilization:
http://www.donstinson.com/oilpaintings.html
See, for instance, "The Spud", "Lone Star and Pool", or "Imagined Ruin at Rifle Gap", along with plenty of others on that page.
In my eyes, the juxtaposition in these paintings carries the sort of sentiment that I mention. I'm not sure exactly how that happens, except that maybe my mind attaches a pastoral illusion to what is NOT shown in the paintings, which is how and when those objects arrived where we now see them, and what is their history?
Indeed, maybe it is all just a trick of placing them within picturesque, pastoral landscapes, which suggests to us an equally pastoral history. In simpler terms, the prettiness of the picture makes us imagine a nice past for these interesting, out-of-place artifacts.
Before going further, I should clarify that when I mention the "pastoral west", I am referring to the illusion of the frontier as a place that embodies naive ideals of freedom and hope. For most people, the frontier was far from wonderful and delivered to them a tenuousness of comfort as well as a tenuousness of survival itself. And yet, this imagined reality has sustained a romance in the social consciousness. This imagined reality is not as homogenous as I make it sound. There is the "Wild West", which owes itself more to the extroverted hero archetype than the pastoral interpretation that I (perhaps naively, as a matter of psychological mirroring?) presume to widely represent a parallel, introverted urge marked by feelings of internal and external lucidity and transcendence.
Having driven through portions of the southwest on a good number of occasions now, I am forced to acknowledge the marked difference between what I imagine such an experience to be like, and what this experience has often been. But before I describe this gap, I want to clarify that I choose driving over hiking or flying because I have spent the most time driving, and because to me it represents the most robust realization available of the simple concept of freedom in the open country of the west.
I always imagine driving through the west to be an experience of fulfillment, as if transcendence is captured through location. For the amount of thought I have put into some topics in my life, I often uncover such remarkably absurd assumptions lurking in innocuous places. My actual experience of driving in the west has been mixed, and perhaps all the more intriguing for both its variety and its nuance.
The most common feeling is the banality of vanilla boredom, as the miles stretch on and on. This is largely independent of the landscape. It is a simple reality of being human and living on this planet that the timing and tempo of the landscapes that we pass through generally will not jibe with our feelings from moment to moment. Thus, from the "base case" of boredom, you can imagine two dimensions of variance: attachment to / detachment from your surroundings, and the quality of those surroundings. As easy as it seems it would be, to be engaged with beautiful surroundings, it is just as easy to be engaged with anonymous desolation, or to be detached from those same beautiful surroundings. All these possible combinations describe, simply, the experience of a day or a week spent anywhere unfamiliar, but certainly the west, which is paradoxically of a single character, and yet endlessly varying.
I have felt intense detachment for miles upon miles, from Moab to Montrose, up through Wolf Creek Pass, or entering Grand Canyon National Park, scenery be damned. I have likewise felt elation driving through the endless, flat New Mexico prairie, across hailstones fallen out of sight yet still littering the roadway, or on a predawn drive east towards Blue Mesa Reservoir.
So what of the reality of today? The west that I imagined does not exist. The frontier, as was noted generations ago, is forever gone. Did it ever exist how I imagined it? Not likely. I think I have finally understood that I cannot find it in a place. In as much time, however, I have discovered that with time and the peace that is still waiting out there, you can cultivate a feeling. Ultimately, like so many things in life, it is not as simple as it first appears. Regardless, I will again go looking for it, and will continue to find peace in unexpected places.
I don't think I could find a better frame of reference to an especially important marker along the way than the subset of Don Stinson's paintings of the west that are intruded upon by the ruins of civilization:
http://www.donstinson.com/oilpaintings.html
See, for instance, "The Spud", "Lone Star and Pool", or "Imagined Ruin at Rifle Gap", along with plenty of others on that page.
In my eyes, the juxtaposition in these paintings carries the sort of sentiment that I mention. I'm not sure exactly how that happens, except that maybe my mind attaches a pastoral illusion to what is NOT shown in the paintings, which is how and when those objects arrived where we now see them, and what is their history?
Indeed, maybe it is all just a trick of placing them within picturesque, pastoral landscapes, which suggests to us an equally pastoral history. In simpler terms, the prettiness of the picture makes us imagine a nice past for these interesting, out-of-place artifacts.
Before going further, I should clarify that when I mention the "pastoral west", I am referring to the illusion of the frontier as a place that embodies naive ideals of freedom and hope. For most people, the frontier was far from wonderful and delivered to them a tenuousness of comfort as well as a tenuousness of survival itself. And yet, this imagined reality has sustained a romance in the social consciousness. This imagined reality is not as homogenous as I make it sound. There is the "Wild West", which owes itself more to the extroverted hero archetype than the pastoral interpretation that I (perhaps naively, as a matter of psychological mirroring?) presume to widely represent a parallel, introverted urge marked by feelings of internal and external lucidity and transcendence.
Having driven through portions of the southwest on a good number of occasions now, I am forced to acknowledge the marked difference between what I imagine such an experience to be like, and what this experience has often been. But before I describe this gap, I want to clarify that I choose driving over hiking or flying because I have spent the most time driving, and because to me it represents the most robust realization available of the simple concept of freedom in the open country of the west.
I always imagine driving through the west to be an experience of fulfillment, as if transcendence is captured through location. For the amount of thought I have put into some topics in my life, I often uncover such remarkably absurd assumptions lurking in innocuous places. My actual experience of driving in the west has been mixed, and perhaps all the more intriguing for both its variety and its nuance.
The most common feeling is the banality of vanilla boredom, as the miles stretch on and on. This is largely independent of the landscape. It is a simple reality of being human and living on this planet that the timing and tempo of the landscapes that we pass through generally will not jibe with our feelings from moment to moment. Thus, from the "base case" of boredom, you can imagine two dimensions of variance: attachment to / detachment from your surroundings, and the quality of those surroundings. As easy as it seems it would be, to be engaged with beautiful surroundings, it is just as easy to be engaged with anonymous desolation, or to be detached from those same beautiful surroundings. All these possible combinations describe, simply, the experience of a day or a week spent anywhere unfamiliar, but certainly the west, which is paradoxically of a single character, and yet endlessly varying.
I have felt intense detachment for miles upon miles, from Moab to Montrose, up through Wolf Creek Pass, or entering Grand Canyon National Park, scenery be damned. I have likewise felt elation driving through the endless, flat New Mexico prairie, across hailstones fallen out of sight yet still littering the roadway, or on a predawn drive east towards Blue Mesa Reservoir.
So what of the reality of today? The west that I imagined does not exist. The frontier, as was noted generations ago, is forever gone. Did it ever exist how I imagined it? Not likely. I think I have finally understood that I cannot find it in a place. In as much time, however, I have discovered that with time and the peace that is still waiting out there, you can cultivate a feeling. Ultimately, like so many things in life, it is not as simple as it first appears. Regardless, I will again go looking for it, and will continue to find peace in unexpected places.
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