(abandoned substack draft)
No piece of work can ever fully contextualize itself, you’ll go mad trying. But what if things were more artful? What if I made an effort to thread all my posts and essays artfully? There would be less to remember
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artful incompleteness – the only sensible approach for finite beings in an infinite universe.
i like the phrase, i like the sketch, and this might be constraints pt 2. steve jobs quote about obsolete with grace. do i still like it? i now feel overwhelmed.
My favorite thing about this charcoal drawing, shared by DrPunkNomad, is its incompleteness. I love that there are whole sections that aren’t filled in. I love the contrast between the nuanced detail of shading in the woman’s face, contrasted with the loose and sketchy lines of the man’s. I love that the lines where her hands would be trail off to nothing. I like it more, I think, than I would’ve liked it if it were complete.
I’ve noticed this to be a recurring pattern for me. There’s something lively and fresh to me about the drafted lines.
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Every utterance requires editorial decision-making. You said what you chose to say, or write. That was a choice. Maybe it was a subconscious choice. Maybe it was a reflex, in which case it was a reflex informed by years of practice. We are our choices.
(sufficiently caveated advice is indistinguishable from chaos)
I wrote a note to myself in my Google Keep years ago that said, “when publish, I happy, when no publish, I no happy”. Seems like it might be hackable, right? Why not just be publishing all the time? Well, implicit in there is that I have standards. I don’t mind tweeting large volumes of mildly interesting thoughts, and I don’t mind publishing noisy drafts on various side-blogs, but it’s important to me that if I were to capital-p Publish something, that it be deliberately thoughtful.
But here’s the annoying thing, I’m a finite being with finite knowledge. I can imagine spending years workshopping on my Essays – and I know that there have been people in history who did exactly that, and in some sense that is what I am doing. But I can’t go years without publishing anything. One, that would make me unhappy. Two, it’s an unwise thing for an author
Explanations- king died and queen died. Queen died of grief. Why do you love her?
Struggling? Toiling, grappling. In some ways this is the dream. Not many people get to spend a year of their life just thinking. I was hoping that this would be fun and pleasurable. And in some sense it is, but in another sense I’m just getting my ass kicked every day. But is this the worst I’ve experienced? No, far from it. It was worse being 13, 17, 25. We think in problems. The mind is a problem simulator, generator. We experience reality as a set of constraints and regulations, limits to our powers. Walls we can’t walk through. But not all walls are solid, many are hallucinated. Video games taught me
Farmer with no crops, hunter with no catch
As finite beings in an infinite universe we have to learn to be okay with imperfection. Or not! Many people surely die unhappy and dissatisfied
Showmanship
My wife asks me what I’m writing about. I ask myself that question too. What’s it about? I struggle with it. It takes a long time to know what something is about. I wrote two books without really knowing what they’re about.
I’ve been struggling with context. Who are these essays for? What is their purpose? I could try and write them to impress people. It’s always nice to impress people, especially impressive people who aren’t easily impressed. The hardest and easiest person to impress is myself. Easiest because you know yourself better, hardest because you know yourself. In a way it’s like masturbation? Which is such an ugly word and a phrase used so dismissively. Oh he’s just jerking off. They’re all jerking each other off. What’s so wrong with that? I bet u kiss girls f*ggot.
A phrase from an old Meryl Streep interview has been ringing in my mind, where in describing her process she says “I’m so inscrutable to myself”. It gives me a sense of relief to hear someone so much more established and professional than me admit that. And my theory is that it’s actually what allows her to produce great work, magical work, because she isn’t limited by her own flimsy bad explanation of how she works
That’s what I want to do with my essays. I want to live into possibility. I want to expand imaginations. There have been times where I’ve doubted the value of my work. And here I get a callback to some of my earliest posts, over 10 years old, “why does the world need another blog anyway?” I have lots of answers to this
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“i’ve been working on like the same ~15 essays for 20 years and sometimes i wonder if i’d be liberated if i just decide that i’m done with them lol. i’d like to at least draft them out this year. realistically i think this is a life’s work that will take 20-40-60 more years but project management is about figuring out intermediate incomplete steps that one is ok with (this itself is one of the essays, very meta)”