I was doing the dishes last night and listening to some year-old youtube vlogs of myself doing my monthly status updates. One that stuck with me was me talking about me thinking about “the packaging problem”, which is one of maybe a couple of dozen open questions that have been stewing in my mind for years.

There are many ways of phrasing this question. We are finite beings dealing with effectively infinite nuance and complexity. How do we ever say anything meaningful? George Orwell said that “every book is a failure”, and I really felt that very strongly when working on my own books. There’s just not enough time and space to say everything that there is to say. I’m reminded of a quote that goes something like, “only god can speak of the whole of the thing, and it takes an omniscient being all of eternity to say it”. Which rhymes with “the Tao that can be spoken of is not the eternal Tao”, which reminds me of when I used to joke about my anxious need to explain the Tao, which was greatly relieved by someone responding “perhaps allow the Tao to explain itself”.

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There’s a version of this essay that ends just like that. It’s a good place to end. It starts with a question, “how do we ever say anything meaningful”, and ends with an open-ended directive, paraphrased: “allow the meaning to speak for itself”. There’s an elegance to it, and elegance is valuable for its own sake. The reader is encouraged to figure out for themselves what that might mean to them. And I do encourage you to maybe pause for a second and see what comes up.

I feel like I want to say more, though. There’s a bit of a risk in pursuing this. I’m reminded of typographer Paula Scher talking about the right moment to end a pitch. You should end on a high note, when the resonance is at a peak. In pitch meetings, apparently the second peak is typically the highest peak you’ll ever get, so that’s where you should end. In writing an essay, however, it’s possible to have successively higher and higher peaks. And a big part of what I want to do with my essay is to begin with some interesting thought, and then pursue higher peaks. What is painful to admit is that I won’t always reach them. But I want to try.

Patrice O’Neal: “Funny jokes and unfunny jokes come out of the same birth. You don’t know if anything is going to be funny before you say it. You should be able to attempt to make anything funny.”

I feel similarly about insight. You should be able to attempt to make anything insightful. Or interesting. And I want to use these essays to attempt to approach interestingness in ways that I find personally gratifying. I’ve been distracted at times by the impulse to try and “write something proper”, but having twisted myself in knots about it, I’m now returning to the notion that propriety is a scam and a trap and I should avoid it or otherwise beat it with a stick. Which is a bit of a scary thing to do, and it amuses me to note that I do still possess some sort of fear in this domain, considering that I spent so much of my youth loudly roleplaying as a fearless transgressor of the norm.

Anyway. The thing I want to nerd out about this morning is incompleteness. I’ve recently been blessed with the realization that several different essays I’ve been meaning to write are all really about the same idea. I want to write something about “the framing problem”, and about “artful incompleteness”, and about “growing obsolete with grace”, and about “people-shaped”

Sometimes vague is the correct amount of precise.

(It’s now 537am, my son woke up crying about an hour ago, and I changed his diaper, fed him, and then walked around with him until he fell asleep. Got distracted by twitter for a while but I do want to try and give this a real shot and finish it.

abandoned