Aesthetics and Objectivism, Living Together

Buffett has said that we should try to go to bed each day a little wiser than when we woke up. What a wonderfully robust idea. I would go one better - in a Nassim Taleb way - and say that we should learn to experiment with alternate approaches to things we do wrong. Such an idea is not simply robust, but anti-fragile (induced stress - in this case, many things going wrong - will prompt the system to grow stronger).

I resisted reading Taleb for a long time, because my first exposure to him was a video in which he most completely ruffled his feathers at an interviewer in his most arrogant way. But, I am such a hypocrite! If it is difficult to suffer fools (I must admit I think it is, although the sole strategy I allow myself is simply to attempt their avoidance), then it is difficult, too, to suffer lesser philosophies. He is no quasi-intellectual (read his recent paper on tail risk treatments across distribution domains here). But do not misunderstand me - I am no snob. As these formless (though potent) ideas have taken shape and combined and aged within me, I have found the most common effect to be that I speak of them less. (to assume that such a tendency belongs also to others is to be shown convincing evidence that we are not evolved for this society we have formed)

Such things are not my primary joys today, though. I have come back to literature after being gone so long, and it has been something like a renaissance. I have been both reading and writing with a joy beyond what I have experienced in a long time - ten years or more. What strange teleological thinking I have always had, to assume such things could simply end. I believe I have banished that from my mind, although I may find myself broadening such a thought beyond my wildest dreams before I am done here. BioTime (NYSE:BTX) seems to be cracking the code to deliver stem cell-derived regenerative therapies for everything from retinal degradation to heart disease in the next few years. Speaking of telelogical thinking, what will happen to the earth's population when regenerative therapy is not only complete but ubiquitous? The effect on availability of human capital practically begs for a new era of slavery (we may consider our laws to be based on collective morality, but over time the morality implied by our laws bends towards profit).

And quite separately, others will find me endlessly delusional to suggest it - and although I still mean it only as playful conjecture - one day we may find that we are not from the past, but from the future. Extrapolate the history of video games and regenerative technology into the future and what do you have? Would you want to live in that world or this one? It even invites fractal arguments of iteration - probably the outer world does not quite look the same as ours, with both symmetries and derivations pervasive in its architecture and ours. What a book that would be to write.

But I digress. I was talking about books, and I was sitting here thinking about one or two of them, even as I was writing something completely unrelated. I want a long holiday alone with my books without urgency, alone with thoughts and easy desires. I want to escape the anxieties that my lifestyle has injected so unnaturally into my everyday composure and disposition. I want my mind to clear. So, I will work on that first - eating healthier, developing an approach to health that will work because it will feel natural. Now, if only I could wake up early to do yoga or take a long lunch at work to meditate.

And finally, I can see my two worlds living together, after all these years. I believe my future is to accept objectivism and aesthetics into the same place in my mind and go forward. But if I must choose, objectivism will not stand a chance. Give me the loves in my life and set me off.

A Book and an Update

I am reading "Fooled by Randomness" by Nassim Taleb, which by any standards of what I have read before, makes me feel still inadequate. It can almost be described as a treatise on knowledge. A wide subject, and one he does not completely traverse, but he touches many parts and many of them turn to gold. I think his next book - Anti-Fragility: How to Live in a World We Don't Understand - looks to be even better and I can only hope that its ultimate influence is both strong and positive. He is a dreadfully arrogant and disagreeable man but he is also often right.

What else is there to be said about the present? I am happy with myself and find myself wondering if this is the eye of some great hurricane, passing - for sure - too slowly over me to notice what is happening at all from one day to the next. Coming to understand some layer of life only succeeds in breaking confusion through to the next layer. Lately I have become concerned with my health. What have I done, what do I continue to do to my body and mind? I can't help but think that I have become a bit of a hypochondriac. I imagine my mind slowly destroyed by medication, my eyes and my ears by my own failure to acknowledge their fallibility.

But these feelings are fleeting. Hopefully they are just strong enough to motivate my own tempered and rational action. Hopefully they ultimately serve to bring me back to myself as I have been and continue to be - not as something permanent or immovable but as someone at peace with his own being that follows a long arc towards an end we can be sure is unavoidable.

The weather is warm, the food lately has been great (great Mexican Eggs Benedict this morning and an even better Moroccan Brochette sandwich this afternoon), the bike riding enjoyable and Merry's company always wonderful. I'd love to get greedy but instead I will try only to be thankful.

Some Thoughts on Trying to Write Well

After a hiatus of close to a week, today I was rereading what I have recently written (12 pages I am currently happy with) and I found that many of my conclusions from a week ago were now much different. In the past this is something that I would have been instantly offended by ("how will I ever be happy if my goals keep changing?"), but I persevered in thought and realized quite simply that the idea that my new conclusions were more important than the old ones was actually quite inconclusive. I simply quieted my mind of these concerns and revised to the best of my humble intuition and was happy with the result.

I am not an authority on the subject of writing (although I read about half of Norman Mailer's "The Spooky Art" in early mornings manning a cash register at Barnes & Noble some years ago), but I have been thinking a lot about the limitations of the medium. It seems to me that one of the most obvious limitations is not actually specific to writing at all but is a limitation of the world. We cannot perfectly reconstruct subjectivity no matter how hard we try. You cannot turn a reader into the character in the book. So in writing, you have to make lots of compromises to get as close as possible.

It seems to me that another problem is that as you attempt to plumb deeper into a character, the standard litany of storytelling tools becomes less and less useful. It is easy to show - even through action alone - that a character is angry or happy. It is far more difficult to thread words and actions into a tapestry that enumerates the person's life. But good writing tells us far more than what is on the page (i.e. Hemingway's "iceberg" theory). And though I do not claim it is the same problem (merely related), at the micro level, how indeed do you put the reader into the character in some specific moment in time when the character's own consciousness must differ so far from the reader's? You have to bend the story or bend the character or bend the actions. For example:

I am writing a scene where a character is drunk. I want to express the delusion that feels so incontrovertible when in that state but that is an absurdity later. How can this be done in writing? I don't want to describe it as such - I want the reader to feel all the same emotions, not read literal description of the event. It is a full dimension of difference. Well, I can't make the reader drunk (that would be some trick), but I can distort action (or in this case, the rigor of logic carried in a conversation) to frame an idea as evasive to the average reader as the idea is to the character in his state. So the "drunk" character is thinking far above his level because what "feels" difficult to the character takes something very different to "feel" the same to the reader. This is a work in progress but I believe that of the possible distortions, it is the best choice.

I also can't be certain but I believe as I was rereading part of my work today, I picked up a note of Shakespeare in my writing (not trying to congratulate myself - I'm talking about the spirit of the writing, not the quality). I think what I have been writing can't help but explore the boundaries of its characters. My work has no narrative momentum or consistency in dialog (yet) but it has a tone and I think it has ideas.

In the Throes of Process

Today I began writing. This is a milestone not because words were produced but because I smiled afterwards. Here are my thoughts today:

1) I must establish tone.

2) I will force myself to make the first pass through a continuous chunk (not sure how big it will be yet) about story and tone and leave pacing for a revision.

3) I have a sense of theme but that is not enough. I need to figure out what themes are going to work together and how. I know what I want to say but what is my vocabulary for doing so?

This is a mysterious enterprise, but I am excited to be underway.

Inspiration Strikes

Over the past few months, I have mentally explored the proposition of writing something careful and focused. I will not go so far as to say that I have given genesis to the idea of a "book", or "story", or anything particular, in fact. But, I believe the writing process would be good for me.

I suppose there is a preconception with writing that the person writing does it to fulfill external desires (communication, sharing, etc...). I cannot speak for others, but in this case, I would say that is not true. I believe that I need the writing process to give myself an understanding of what has happened to me in the last ten years. How did I come to this conclusion? I think it was Joanna Newsom who first planted the idea in my head that writing can be an intensely introspective activity; she described a song she wrote as an attempt to make sense of certain events.

Although I do not think it is adequate to invoke the saying, "art imitates life", it may be a start. If art is expected to retain truth, than I believe art approximates life. They are a continuum, but it should not be forgotten that life is the primary and must necessarily be the anchor to art, just as the sun is primary to the moon and anchors it interminably.

This means that although the process of writing may be difficult, the concept of good writing is exceedingly simple. You must simply write reality. All formalism is but the hope of some shortcut that must necessarily be a compromise, or a beautiful distraction.

I could itemize the times in my life that I have come across grand statements that I thought needed to be made, but these statements would make for terrible reading because they were all cast under a common illusion - that the order of the universe allows us to remove or change one thing and expect all else to remain unharmed. That is a lazy way of writing. Good writing does not tolerate shortcuts. Words cannot - in essence - say more than the content of the words, and a story likewise cannot say more than the content of the story.

As I undertake the process of writing, my hope is not to complete some certain thing, but rather to understand the material I will write. Perhaps it seems counterintuitive, but I believe that I will be more likely to complete whatever is required by the content if I rather pursue the goal of understanding. But I digress. All is conjecture, and it is a destructive enterprise to try to outguess the future. Time will tell all in the clearest voice.

The Shadow of the Wind, part 1

It has occurred to me on numerous occasions that Radiohead produce better album art - and more consistently - than any other band I know. For this feat, we have Stanley Donwood to thank, who is Radiohead's perennial visual artist/associate. Years ago, when I was obsessed with Radiohead (let's say, 2002), Mr. Donwood produced a written work that you might call a story and that took the form of a thin book. Now, most of the productive output of the people in or associated with Radiohead is hard to nail down (I think I am being complimentary to say this), but Mr. Donwood's "Catacombs of Terror!" had a basic formula. Were it to be stocked in your local Barnes and Noble, you'd find it under mystery, but this mystery was suffused with intentionally-inelegant plotting and a peculiarly affected ("lo-fi"?) writing style and was marketed as a rip-off of third-rate pulp thrillers of the past. I cannot vouch for that comparison, but Donwood's style was idiosyncratic enough (and carefully attuned enough) that I doubt that simple comparison does the novel justice.

Lately I have been reading "The Shadow of the Wind" by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, and in the process of doing so, have had a hell of a time un-knotting my mixed and myriad feelings towards it. There are some things I can say for sure:

1) The pacing is outstanding, as mystery novels must usually be to be a success.

2) The literary references to Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the reviews are legitimate and truly bound into the tapestry of the text and specifically, Zafon's imagination. The references to Borges are topical (a labyrinth of books, temporal mirroring and incongruity) and 400 pages in, I would judge them to be irrelevant. I can't speak for Eco, having not read any of his works.

3) Zafon writes good scenes and good dialogue, and has a way with evoking place and time without trying hard. However, he places all of this between filler that is often boring, obvious, cliche.

4) If Zafon is capable of writing a female character that is not one-dimensional, he does not explore the talent here.

It took me until tonight to realize that the reason I have been overwhelmingly willing to cut him slack on #3 and #4 is that the clunky characteristics of the book are reminiscent of Catacombs of Terror!, a book where these characteristics are taken to be ironic (or at least intentionally absurd). I believe my mind has mapped this absurdity/irony onto The Shadow of the Wind, and therefore I respond to it as a compelling story told with the author winking at the reader. Ironically, this level of formalism that glosses over the entire story - a construct that I have to believe I alone see - may be the most Borgesian thing about the book.

So, to review, a second-rate book written as an affected tribute to third-rate stories has convinced me that this first-rate book with several notable drawbacks is actually something close to sublime. Wish me luck in the last 100 pages.

Impressions from Colorado

I recently went on a skiing trip to Colorado, a trip that I can say had two highlights: skiing, and the drive home.

Skiing sort of speaks for itself and you could do worse than simply to say that it costs a lot of money and it is money well spent if you get up on the mountain and can manage to enjoy it. We had lots of mountain weather variety (snow, sun, wind) and lots of friends around to ski with, which at one or two points congealed into a borderline-transcendental experience. I had a lot of fun doing dangerous things (never a good combination) like flying through the woods on narrow paths, which I have promised myself I will not do again with such indiscretion. For someone who is neither a speed nor adrenaline junkie, skiing really brought both out in me.

I suppose you could say that I like to be the driver when leaving home and the passenger when returning. Most people will say that the drive home is a drag and a chore, which the act of driving itself can be, but there are few things I like better than the chance to meditate on the events of the vacation during a drive home. This trip afforded lots of time, ample back-seat room, appropriate homebound weather (rolling storms in the distance, a variety of overcast tones), good music (thank you, Brian Eno, Great Lake Swimmers, and Junior Boys) and good reading material (The Crossing). (It cannot be denied that I surely know what I like, and I have expended much thought and energy refining the process of achieving it.)

I have been especially struck lately by the way McCarthy's novels of the Southwest, filled with so much desolation and violence, only increase my affection for the land. The Crossing is my new favorite of his stories (not bad for a book I couldn't finish the first time I tried), although it would be hard not to admit that Blood Meridian contains a much stronger and tightly cohesive vision. More importantly, though, the protagonist in The Crossing contains a more closely observed moral character. I cannot relate to the Kid in Blood Meridian in the slightest, but I am with Billy every page of The Crossing. I believe I will reread it again and again in the future.