What’s my purpose in writing this? I’ve asked this question countless times, in different ways, on different screens and pages and interfaces. It’s rare that a clear answer comes forth. I’ll eventually get to one tentative answer here.
The need to communicate compels me, yet, as I gradually construct a fully-formed thought or idea or argument, the impulse to complete and share it often diminishes. I might forget or abandon the idea. More likely, I’ll tuck it away in some recess of my long-term memory. I’m like a poorly-compensated archivist tending a collection of many wonderful things, but I don’t have the resources to catalogue, let alone synthesize and build from, my repository.
I feel bad that my public writing is so often fragmented, fuzzy, imprecise, promising without delivering, searching without finding, myopic. I’m starting to see why it’s like this.
I’m not erudite at all but I do have mental web of breadth and depth, I think, which functions like a hyper-IOU of erudition. It’s a huge assembly of placeholders of something that a very intelligent, very curious, person could get to if they had enough time. (And I aspire to both intelligence and leisure, but have less of either than I’d like.) “I should get to Charles Fort’s paranormal writings in more detail…” “I really ought to study Aristotle in depth…” “Better brush up on geometry…” “I bet there’s something useful in that Trouillot book…” “Note to self: look up whether the ideal Maillard reaction in cooking really requires that the food stays stuck to the cooking surface without moving…” “Which Category III Hong Kong films would I be best aided by watching?” “Wouldn’t it be a fun challenge to learn Sanskrit?” “What’s the benefit if I were to try to optimize my workouts more?” “Oh damn, I need to learn about finance…”
Ugh, it’s exhausting for me to sit through so I’m sure it’s worse for anyone else.
Still—in this posture is the beginning of a hard-won comfort with the basic fact of ignorance. Being temperamentally curious involves saying “I don’t know, but I’d like to” over and over. Tension arises between this curiosity, on one hand, and my desire to speak from a position of earned authority, on the other. There’s the rub! Pencil shavings, dead skin, old paint. My “writing” is the friction between my will to learn, relearn, remember, integrate, and my desire not to be an idiot who makes people’s lives even the tiniest bit worse with my stupid words. The reticence of the latter desire filters the exuberance of the former. I think maybe it’s like making spirits. When I’m lucky, my curiosity is distilled. There is a lot of waste product, though, and much is lost to the angels’ share.
More Sarah Perry: I read her Ribbonfarm essay on magical thinking and a lot of threads seemed to come together. I’ll write about a couple of them here. She mentions the early 20th century philosopher Hans Vaihinger, whom I’ve not yet read, but whose work David Auerbach has praised (if I recall correctly), and whose work inspired a Kwame Anthony Appiah book a couple years ago. Vaihanger’s famous work is called The Philosophy of ‘As If.’ Perry’s post relates that within a context, for a purpose, we treat something that is not the case (as far as we know) to be the case—as if it were true. We do this because it can be useful to do so for certain purposes, in certain situations. This “as if” is a form of abstract thought and is tied to a mind shaped by literacy and/or “education.” A less literacy-addled approach to reality demurs from this kind of thinking; it is based on concrete and tangible experiences instead.
(So Marshall McLuhan says reading is a form of scanning that involves rapid, sequential, high volume guessing. Context clues allow one to follow the thread. Insofar as ‘postliteracy’ is a valid condition, I think it’s interesting in that it’s like orality but is no longer sequential in the basis of speech [or text], but synchronous.)
I can’t speak for all people who work in this paradigm, but I don’t take distinctions like these—e.g., literalism and concrete referentiality as functions of limited education or literacy—as judgmental or normative classifications. I read them as attempts at description. We’re trying to describe cognitive-sensory-media environments that may prompt their own inhabitants to view “outsiders with,” maybe, suspicion or arrogance. But we don’t have to reproduce any of negative connotations. Perhaps, too, this is a kind of ego-defense. I realize that, although I spend a lot of my time thinking about different forms of the world as if, I also am often blocked, and feel slow, and dumb, because I want to know on the most tangible and palpable grounds why something is the way it is, or why something true is, after all, true. (Case in point: the Monty Hall problem. I get it, sure, but I only really got it after I sat down and worked it out with a simulator many times to experience it. It was and remains extremely difficult for me to break out of the intuition that switching doors has no bearing on the probability.)
It’s OK. I have learned to be more cognizant of the ways that I’m hugely ignorant and undertrained, and that’s an important first step! Perry argues:
“We moderns have less understanding than our ancestors, not more, of how our technology works and where our food, clothing, tools, and dwellings come from. The more complex a technological package, the more a phenomenalistic stance toward technology is valuable.”
Magical thinking is, in fact, how we deal with the complexity of our literate or post-literate, and highly technological world, where divisions of labor are also enormously separated. I’m sure few people reading this will have a truly clear grasp of how, for example, asphalt is made and how it’s bought and sold and apportioned and how it really “works” in our roadways. (Yet through experience we know that it starts out dark, and lightens to pale gray in the sun, over time. We know potholes can emerge.) Same with computing and machine languages, same with medicines, same with binge-worthy TV shows. We haven’t given up magical thinking. In fact we must resort to magical thinking in a complex world; the alternative would be to render us too concrete, and thus too limited.
In a microcosmic way, this is why Boomers don’t get Zoomer memes. The Boomers have not adapted to some of the same kinds of magic.
We always exist in the chronology of the a few epochs at once, and of course there are remnants of pre-literacy kind of approach to things, too. In Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, a character describes her Midwestern family, who come from Scandinavian stock:
"My mother's too practical to be submerged. The characteristics of her family—and I don't think it's peculiar to that family, I think Danes are this way, and they're not to different from Norwegians in this way either—they're interested in objects. Objects. Tablecloths. Dishes. Vases. They talk endlessly about how much each object costs. My mother's father is like this too, my grandfather Rasmussen. Her whole family. They don't have any dreams in them. They don't have any unreality. Everything is made up of objects and what they cost and how much you can get them for. She goes into people's houses and examines all the objects and knows where they got half of them and tells them where they could have got them for less. And clothing. Each object of clothing. Same thing. Practicality. A bare-boned practicality about the whole bunch of them. Thrifty. Extremely thrifty. Clean. Extremely clean. She'll notice, when I come home from school, if I have one bit of ink under one fingernail from filling a fountain pen. When she's having guests on a Saturday evening, she sets the table Friday night at about five o'clock. It's there, every glass, every piece of silver. And then she throws a light gossamer thing over it so it won't get dust specks on it. Everything organized perfectly."
For years I’ve been haunted by the line, “They don’t have any unreality.” This is meant to describe those who aren’t partaking in the types of magical, hypothetical, fictional thinking that allow for that “as if” conditional cognition. I have some of that same object-experience stubbornness myself, as I’ve related. (Perhaps it’s some kind of inheritance from my own family lineage, ingrained from so many generations until my Norwegian great-grandfather came over to the American Midwest. I don’t know.) But I’m most energized by questions that may not have a definite answer. I’m enlivened by discursive directions that are hard to predict, and which continue to produce questions.
Attendance Optional is a free newsletter and I write it in a larger spirit of freedom, as well. There’s no agenda. I follow some of my interests—that’s all. I hope that anyone reading it does so because they choose to do so, because they’re interested, not because they feel obligated. Any real sense of obligation, then, comes back to me. I want to write something that will be a distillation of my mental activity and that will, in turn, be useful or pleasant or generative for those who do choose to read it. I don’t want you, Reader, to feel like you’re wasting your time when so many of us feel like time and energy and focus are precious.
So, what’s my purpose in writing this? If anything that I say is helpful to any readers as they navigate their own management of attention, time, energy, ideas, etc., that’s fantastic. I love to know that I’m not alone and I hope that other people might get that sense from me, too. That all said, I’m not interested in doing just “meta” newsletters where I wring my hands and gaze at my navel about my own processes. I’d like to dig deeper into actual objects. I’m always open to conversation or suggestion—so if you’re curious about something, or want to push back or provide a recommendation or just shoot the breeze, always feel free to respond in whatever way makes sense to you. Feedback, catch-up emails, etc., have made for the best reward so far.
I’m thinking my next installment, whenever that comes, will probably be another closer look at a single film—something along the lines of my Waterloo Bridge post from a while back. Cheers.