• 7. flow garden(?) — meandering essay reflecting on what it’s like to really just allow words to flow, like food coloring in water, in patterns that you cannot precisely anticipate in advance. cascades of minimal-exertion, “Doing Easy“, allow the waves to carry you, be surprised
• Have you ever done that science experiment where you put some kind of salt in some kind of solution, and a tree-like precipitate emerges out of it? I just looked it up… the closest seeming example involves using a sodium silicate solution and metal salts like copper chloride, iron sulphate and so on. For some reason I’ve had that mental image on my mind lately. This 3 minute youtube video is a nice skim through some interesting visuals of how different metal salts “sprout” differently.

A similar visual I have in my mind is how a bit of food coloring spreads through clear water.

I kinda wish it was a gif instead so we could watch it. There are some gifs of food coloring spreading through water, but none of them are particularly pretty. Shaky cameras and such.

Anyway. Why is all this so compelling to me right now? Well, I’m trying to get a sense of… flow. Because I’ve been feeling stuck for a long time now, and I’m just about ready to try anything. I start looking for images or ideas that might maybe laterally nudge me in some direction that I’m not considering. What does water do when it runs up against an obstacle? It flows around it. When I try to recreate a ‘felt sense’ of what flow has felt like in the past for me in my writing, it does feel like what those patterns of food coloring look like. There is no ‘exertion’. There is a gentleness to it.

I kinda talked about this in a matryoshka of possibilities – the idea is not necessarily to plot a course in advance, but to feel for what is next. In a stupid bravery I quote Christopher Alexander: “we may gradually improve patterns by testing them against experience – see whether our surroundings live, or not, by recognizing how we feel.” The task I have in front of me is to navigate by feeling, and I keep trying to avoid that by trying to think my way out of my puzzles. But my thinking is necessarily constrained by my assumptions, which include assumptions that I’m not consciously aware of. We know more than we think, and we feel more than we know. I have to feel my way out of these puzzles.

What puzzles? Well. There are several puzzles that overlap and intertwine. And it gets recursive, too— because my definition of my puzzles are constructed out of my thoughts. My intellectual interpretations of my perceptions, colored once again by my subconscious judgements which have become a kind of psychic prison that I’m trapped in, and would like to break free from. If I have a problem that persists for a long time despite varied attempts to solve it, I must begin to consider that I’m framing the puzzle the wrong way. Asking the wrong question. Some of the questions I started with were things like, “How do I publish decent substack posts at a regular cadence”, and “how do I write about things that aren’t just me grumbling about my creative process”? I have some soulless answers to those questions that I don’t particularly care for. My real challenge is to look for a compelling question that feels right from the inside. So, what’s the question today, Visa? Why are we here? The question is… maybe “What can we see?” That feels somewhat warm and not-soulless, but it doesn’t feel like the heart of the thing. I’m unlikely to get to the heart of the thing on my first attempt; that’s the thing about persistent puzzles. There’s layers upon layers.

Here again I feel compelled to nerd out a bit about the movie Inception (2010) – the team’s goal is to incept Fischer with the idea to dissolve his father’s company, but they don’t actually know right away how they’re going to do it. They go into the first level of the dream basically to look for clues that they can use at the deeper levels. And there they find a photograph of Fischer and his father, playing with a paper pinwheel. (I’m fudging some details here– they find the photo in Fischer’s wallet– but eh, not relevant to what I’m saying here.)

Only after finding this photo— having already set out on the trip!— do they figure out how the Inception is to be done. Fischer at this point remains convinced that his father is disappointed in him, doesn’t particularly care for him, and so on. The team figures out that they can use the pinwheel to convince Fischer otherwise. If his father kept the pinwheel in his safe all along, it would be proof that he cherished a memory with Fischer, and by extension, that he actually loved his son.

There’s an interesting discussion to be had about what it means that Fischer’s feelings of catharsis are based on what amounts to basically a fictitious illusion constructed by Cobb’s team. There are some parallels with actual therapeutic techniques like “memory reconsolidation” where some people seem to have made real breakthroughs on deep-rooted emotional issues by imagining past scenarios playing out differently. But I don’t really want to get much into that in this post. Rather I simply want to reflect on the fact that the Inceptors didn’t precisely know how they were going to achieve their goal until midway through the process.

I believe that this echoes the creative process, or at least my own idealized creative process. I seldom like to start a project and then finish it exactly as I had envisioned it at the start. I like to be changed by the process of working on it. I like to change my mind. I like to get new perspectives. I like to find surprises that make me go, “Oh wow, I should totally put this in there, I should totally rework this around that,” and so on. With my book Introspect, for example– I rewrote the entire book from scratch at least 7 or 8 times, changing some very fundamental things about it each time. I’d write it one way, find it lacking somehow, or stale, or stiff, and then start over. Initially I thought the question was “how do you figure out what you want?”– and after answering that question a dozen different ways, I found myself thinking, “that’s the wrong question– wants aren’t something you ‘figure out’, wants are something that arise quite naturally when they aren’t blocked or suppressed”. So Introspect then evolved to become a book about unlearning suppression. For a while I was frustrated with how the book was talking about introspection but it wasn’t itself ‘introspective’– since practically every suggestion could be fruitfully contradicted. But if I simply contradicted everything I said as I said it, it became unreadable. I can’t recall precisely when or how it hit me– I think I was thinking of the theatre, and how you could have narrators or characters address the audience in front of the curtains in between Acts— and I realized that I could actually just demonstrate what I mean by introspection, by introspecting in real time between Acts. I think it’s one of the cleverest things I do in the book, and many readers have told me that they found it surprising, refreshing, humanizing and so on.

Solving the core puzzle of Introspect’s structure was one of the most satisfying things I’ve ever done in my life. (There are actually still some unsolved ‘sections’, which I intend to get to for my next update of the book.) Yes, it’s great to get all this positive reader feedback and people telling me that it’s changed their life and so on. And I do think it’s possible that readers might’ve felt that way even if I didn’t solve the puzzle, though probably not as much. I should also add that before I could solve the core structural puzzle, I had to solve the definitional puzzle– the puzzle of “what is this book even, anyway?” What is it’s name?”

I can’t recall when exactly I figured out that this current era of this substack should be called Frame Studies, but that was a very satisfying day. Just as it was satisfying to come up with the names for Friendly Ambitious Nerd and Introspect. But I realize there are still major puzzles in Frame Studies that I haven’t solved yet, and it makes sense that I’ll continue to feel stuck until I concoct a breakthrough. I first seem to have used the phrase “Frame Studies” in 2019.

abandoned