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.
Sunday, September 8, 2013
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.
Tuesday, November 27, 2012
Lessons of the Blue Period
In the depths of the past...
I recently salvaged a virtual treasure trove of old email, photos, and writings off an old computer I am getting ready to sell. The pictures, I expected. The email and writings took me by a surprise that was more than pleasant. Indeed, I believed that I had long since lost most of it - spanning roughly from early 2000 until mid-2004 - a span of time that I have long referred to as my Blue Period (overstated, sure, but also appropriate).
In early 2000, I had recently moved out of my parents house for the first time - at least, half-way moved out. I was spending a majority of my nights staying up, watching The X-Files and sleeping in until late afternoon. I was coming out of a break-up (a person's first break-up is never just a break-up, of course - more on this below) and hadn't regained my bearings. With the comfort of home, the safety net of friends, and whatever particular mental predilections I had at the time, "bearings" were scarcely on my radar. I lacked the skill of self-stabilization (and perhaps I still do, in a way). I drifted. (I only recently started to understand that I did this as a characteristic of my personality - I wasn't "damaged"; I was reacting how I was inclined to react, for better or worse.)
A break-up, of course, can always be destabilizing. It is a catalyst, and what it becomes a catalyst towards is a function of the particulars - of the people involved, of the timing in life. A first break-up is only more likely to happen at an intensity and during a time when these catalysts will provide for more volatile trajectories.
My life was full of immense variety and gave me many surprises in those four years, but in at least one way, it was homogenous - I was almost always within the shadow of depression. Perhaps, however, I have forgotten just how much variety I experienced - both externally and internally in that time. I hope that the writing I did during those periods of time help me in that sense. I skimmed it the other night. Some of it came back to me. Some of it blew my mind. Some of it even scared me in at least one way - reading those entries, I realized that I was, at least for a period of time when I was emerging from depression, more conscious, dynamic, creative, and expressive than I am today.
I always worry that I am falling into the grooves - that is, the grooves of ingrained behavior, to use the metaphor Steve Jobs used about people who grow older and get caught and dragged inexorably into habit and away from conscious decision and thought. Getting better at things is NOT an evasion of habit - quite the opposite. Work, then, is a prison to this fate because it predisposes us to the process.
I worry, more than anything, that life seems to be a little too good, at the moment. I have Merry, I have a good job, I have the money to do whatever I want. I have hobbies I enjoy, I get excited by lots of things in my life. I am never bored for long, and when I am, it is more temporary burnout than boredom. The weekends occasionally suffer from the boredom of the privileged - too many choices, and among them the luxury that we choose simply to rest.
What am I missing? Something, I fear, that will only be seen in hindsight. I finally can do anything I want - the curses of poverty (of mind and money) are vanquished. Will time show that I chose wisely, or that I tragically fell into a trap I had trained - and thus baited - myself into?
I recently salvaged a virtual treasure trove of old email, photos, and writings off an old computer I am getting ready to sell. The pictures, I expected. The email and writings took me by a surprise that was more than pleasant. Indeed, I believed that I had long since lost most of it - spanning roughly from early 2000 until mid-2004 - a span of time that I have long referred to as my Blue Period (overstated, sure, but also appropriate).
In early 2000, I had recently moved out of my parents house for the first time - at least, half-way moved out. I was spending a majority of my nights staying up, watching The X-Files and sleeping in until late afternoon. I was coming out of a break-up (a person's first break-up is never just a break-up, of course - more on this below) and hadn't regained my bearings. With the comfort of home, the safety net of friends, and whatever particular mental predilections I had at the time, "bearings" were scarcely on my radar. I lacked the skill of self-stabilization (and perhaps I still do, in a way). I drifted. (I only recently started to understand that I did this as a characteristic of my personality - I wasn't "damaged"; I was reacting how I was inclined to react, for better or worse.)
A break-up, of course, can always be destabilizing. It is a catalyst, and what it becomes a catalyst towards is a function of the particulars - of the people involved, of the timing in life. A first break-up is only more likely to happen at an intensity and during a time when these catalysts will provide for more volatile trajectories.
My life was full of immense variety and gave me many surprises in those four years, but in at least one way, it was homogenous - I was almost always within the shadow of depression. Perhaps, however, I have forgotten just how much variety I experienced - both externally and internally in that time. I hope that the writing I did during those periods of time help me in that sense. I skimmed it the other night. Some of it came back to me. Some of it blew my mind. Some of it even scared me in at least one way - reading those entries, I realized that I was, at least for a period of time when I was emerging from depression, more conscious, dynamic, creative, and expressive than I am today.
I always worry that I am falling into the grooves - that is, the grooves of ingrained behavior, to use the metaphor Steve Jobs used about people who grow older and get caught and dragged inexorably into habit and away from conscious decision and thought. Getting better at things is NOT an evasion of habit - quite the opposite. Work, then, is a prison to this fate because it predisposes us to the process.
I worry, more than anything, that life seems to be a little too good, at the moment. I have Merry, I have a good job, I have the money to do whatever I want. I have hobbies I enjoy, I get excited by lots of things in my life. I am never bored for long, and when I am, it is more temporary burnout than boredom. The weekends occasionally suffer from the boredom of the privileged - too many choices, and among them the luxury that we choose simply to rest.
What am I missing? Something, I fear, that will only be seen in hindsight. I finally can do anything I want - the curses of poverty (of mind and money) are vanquished. Will time show that I chose wisely, or that I tragically fell into a trap I had trained - and thus baited - myself into?
Monday, October 29, 2012
Eno on the Jungian "Subjective"
"Could we call this new style 'Interactive Music'?"
"In a blinding flash of inspiration, the other day I realized that 'interactive' anything is the wrong word. Interactive makes you imagine people sitting with their hands on controls, some kind of gamelike thing. The right word is 'unfinished.' Think of cultural products, or art works, or the people who use them even, as being unfinished. Permanently unfinished. We come from a cultural heritage that says things have a 'nature,' and that this nature is fixed and describable. We find more and more that this idea is insupportable - the 'nature' of something is not by any means singular, and depends on where and when you find it, and what you want it for. The functional identity of things is a product of our interaction with them. And our own identities are products of our interaction with everything else. Now a lot of cultures far more 'primitive' than ours take this entirely for granted - surely it is the whole basis of animism that the universe is a living, changing, changeable place."
- "Gossip is Philosophy" (interview with Brian Eno), Wired Magazine, May 1995
"In a blinding flash of inspiration, the other day I realized that 'interactive' anything is the wrong word. Interactive makes you imagine people sitting with their hands on controls, some kind of gamelike thing. The right word is 'unfinished.' Think of cultural products, or art works, or the people who use them even, as being unfinished. Permanently unfinished. We come from a cultural heritage that says things have a 'nature,' and that this nature is fixed and describable. We find more and more that this idea is insupportable - the 'nature' of something is not by any means singular, and depends on where and when you find it, and what you want it for. The functional identity of things is a product of our interaction with them. And our own identities are products of our interaction with everything else. Now a lot of cultures far more 'primitive' than ours take this entirely for granted - surely it is the whole basis of animism that the universe is a living, changing, changeable place."
- "Gossip is Philosophy" (interview with Brian Eno), Wired Magazine, May 1995
Friday, October 5, 2012
A Case of Synchronicity?
"Natural life is the nourishing soil of the soul, anyone who fails to go along with life remains suspended, stiff and rigid in mid air. That is why so many people get wooden in old age; they look back and cling to the past, with a secret fear of death in their hearts. They withdraw from the life process, at least psychologically, and consequently remain fixed like nostalgic pillars of salt, with vivid recollections of youth but no living relation to the present."
- Carl Jung, Collected Works
Jung would consider it an episode of synchronicity, I believe, that I should pick up his book and read this paragraph first - a paragraph that seems to address my current and ongoing disillusionment directly and speaks to the core of what I feel and what I find myself going around about, again and again.
For my part, I believe in the phenomenon of synchronicity only to the degree that the world is emphatically not random; even seemingly unrelated things will rarely exhibit no correlation, and so, it should not be surprising that more things coincide, and more things rhyme, than we might perceptively expect to find.
That is not the same phenomenon that Jung was describing, but for my part, I cannot judge what happened today when I picked up his book as a case of his or mine, or something else. Or neither.
It is also possible the paragraph means less to me than I may suspect.
- Carl Jung, Collected Works
Jung would consider it an episode of synchronicity, I believe, that I should pick up his book and read this paragraph first - a paragraph that seems to address my current and ongoing disillusionment directly and speaks to the core of what I feel and what I find myself going around about, again and again.
For my part, I believe in the phenomenon of synchronicity only to the degree that the world is emphatically not random; even seemingly unrelated things will rarely exhibit no correlation, and so, it should not be surprising that more things coincide, and more things rhyme, than we might perceptively expect to find.
That is not the same phenomenon that Jung was describing, but for my part, I cannot judge what happened today when I picked up his book as a case of his or mine, or something else. Or neither.
It is also possible the paragraph means less to me than I may suspect.
Thursday, October 4, 2012
Lifecycle of an Illusion
When I was twenty-two I was depressed (still) and bored and drunk, most of the time. There was a stage where I realized how badly I needed to stop drinking and start trying exciting things and start expressing myself in some way that amounted to something. I was certain, in my painfully shortsighted way, that what I needed was essentially a reset.
Now, there is another illusion beneath the one I am after, but about it, I will only say: I have often had thoughts that suggest I am the sort of person that believes that we are products of our environment, expressly. I would never consciously assume such a thing - nor do I think it today - but in subscribing to a lazy potential solution to my problem, I was suggesting as much. I will say, for the record, that such a theory can hardly even sustain illusion, it is so weak.
The idea of a reset is really the idea of escape in disguise, or a slightly practical manifestation of the idea of escape. Deep in the human genome lay the secret of our desires - when we are faced with a difficulty, our deeply-felt preference is for it to simply go away. It takes significant conditioning to abject reality to obstruct such a desire from interfering with day-to-day life. And, the degree to which each of us EVER produces such obstruction varies immensely. Typically, modern difficulties require methods of dispatch that are not impelled by instinct or the natural order of things.
When I was twenty-two, I wanted to reset all of it, and I was certain that the way to do that was to move away, certainly from familiarity and likely from people altogether, or to a place where my interaction with people was limited to my own discretion, which I would of course "want" to limit prudently, because I would have been reset into perfection.
Of all the quick "solutions" to the escape problem that people come up with time and again, moving away is one of the easiest, most absurd, and finally, funniest. Funny, that is, in extreme retrospect. The absurdity, for its part, is breathtaking. In these reactions, it betrays itself. The desire to simply change locations as a solution to life's problems is almost always nothing more than an emotional expression. There is little logic capable of supporting such a notion.
Why do I spend so much time pulling this apart now? Because what I have done recently, when I have chosen to spend my vacation alone, hidden from view, is just an evolutionary descendant of such a silly initial desire. I have found little of what I desired and expected to find. I have even now, in retrospect, identified the disconnect - which, in such a simple formula, cannot have been very many things, so I should not be especially proud of figuring it out. I am guilty of believing that what is desired can ever be expected without the complete understanding that comes from nothing so ordinary as taking the time to ask exhaustive questions and objectify reality.
There is a word for that rare feeling that comes when you get what you want, in practice, without the effort: serendipity. It is never something you earn, any more than anyone ever earns the random vicissitudes they are granted.
Now, there is another illusion beneath the one I am after, but about it, I will only say: I have often had thoughts that suggest I am the sort of person that believes that we are products of our environment, expressly. I would never consciously assume such a thing - nor do I think it today - but in subscribing to a lazy potential solution to my problem, I was suggesting as much. I will say, for the record, that such a theory can hardly even sustain illusion, it is so weak.
The idea of a reset is really the idea of escape in disguise, or a slightly practical manifestation of the idea of escape. Deep in the human genome lay the secret of our desires - when we are faced with a difficulty, our deeply-felt preference is for it to simply go away. It takes significant conditioning to abject reality to obstruct such a desire from interfering with day-to-day life. And, the degree to which each of us EVER produces such obstruction varies immensely. Typically, modern difficulties require methods of dispatch that are not impelled by instinct or the natural order of things.
When I was twenty-two, I wanted to reset all of it, and I was certain that the way to do that was to move away, certainly from familiarity and likely from people altogether, or to a place where my interaction with people was limited to my own discretion, which I would of course "want" to limit prudently, because I would have been reset into perfection.
Of all the quick "solutions" to the escape problem that people come up with time and again, moving away is one of the easiest, most absurd, and finally, funniest. Funny, that is, in extreme retrospect. The absurdity, for its part, is breathtaking. In these reactions, it betrays itself. The desire to simply change locations as a solution to life's problems is almost always nothing more than an emotional expression. There is little logic capable of supporting such a notion.
Why do I spend so much time pulling this apart now? Because what I have done recently, when I have chosen to spend my vacation alone, hidden from view, is just an evolutionary descendant of such a silly initial desire. I have found little of what I desired and expected to find. I have even now, in retrospect, identified the disconnect - which, in such a simple formula, cannot have been very many things, so I should not be especially proud of figuring it out. I am guilty of believing that what is desired can ever be expected without the complete understanding that comes from nothing so ordinary as taking the time to ask exhaustive questions and objectify reality.
There is a word for that rare feeling that comes when you get what you want, in practice, without the effort: serendipity. It is never something you earn, any more than anyone ever earns the random vicissitudes they are granted.
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