(originally a substack draft, abandoned)
Alan Watts had a riff that went, “What would you like to do if money was no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life?”
It was his way of getting people to consider what their hearts desired. And right now I find myself needing to revisit that question for myself. Because I’ve spent over a year all cooped up in my head – thinking, reasoning, questioning, interrogating, planning, redteaming. It’s been productive, I think, but the output so far has been unintelligible. I have enough experience as a writer to not second-guess this too much – I trust that it’ll all work out eventually – but it hasn’t yet, so I’m in the unpleasant place. I’ve been in this exact place while working on my book. I feel knotted, spent, psychologically exhausted in a way that I think manifests in my body and expression.
Less gnashing. When I think about “my career”, by which I mean the lifelong span of time I want to spend working on my craft, it’s important to me that I reduce the amount of time I spend writhing and gnashing in the dark place. The way out, I know, is to produce output and share it with people. This attempt at an essay is maybe my 50th attempt at writing something with the hope of publishing something, anything. The first couple of dozen attempts, I do with a lot of hope. But after a couple of dozen more failed attempts, I begin to get despondent, morose. I get numb. And this is a bad sign, because once I am numb I can’t feel for what is good, and once I can’t feel for what is good, my subsequent output cannot be any good. It’s roughly similar to doing physical exercise past the point of exhaustion. Once your form starts to suffer, it’s time to call it a day. Otherwise you’re only going to injure yourself. I think I have a lot of “conditioning” as a writer, such that I’m not going to end up hating writing entirely, but there have certainly been long-ish spells of time where I’ve been put off from writing.
“Where am I going with this?” is a question that just came up for me, which I’m grateful for. It helps me clarify my intent. There are often multiple answers to this question, and the fact that there are multiple answers explains why I’m stuck, knotted, torn. Part of me just wants to publish anything at all. Another part of me wants to publish something “good”. What does good mean, in this context? Well, I want it to be useful to someone. I don’t want to publish something tedious that my readers (and I am my own #1 reader) feel was a waste of time reading. Well, useful how? A piece of writing can be a pleasure to read for its own sake, because of the artful construction of sentences and paragraphs – and part of me wants Voltaic Verses to be a delight to read all the way through. But that alone does not satisfy me. I also want my writing to grasp at something meaningful. I want my writing to move people, to help them with something. To make something click, to resolve some tension somewhere, to offer relief from some burden. And here I have to laugh, and I am grateful for the laughter – look at me, burdened with the self-imposed pressure to relieve other people of their burdens! What a silly guy. Yes, it’s all very silly.
So. I feel a little better already than when I started writing this. And this is what I want to demonstrate, for myself, and for others. That it’s possible. It’s possible to sit down and write and relieve your burdens via writing. I feel a little less tense, I breathe a little deeper and more easily. I’m reminded, in this tiny instance of writing, that I can have fun, that my writing can be consequential. This is part of why I write. I write for relief. I also write for joy, pleasure, communion, curiosity, purpose, glory. But when I am stuck, I write for relief. And when you play a long enough game, you’re going to have to confront all possible emotions, and deal with all manner of problems, including problems you hadn’t anticipated, and problems that you’d much rather not have to face.
“Now what?” is the question that came up next. What does it take for me to feel good about publishing something? I now have the seed of something decent – pointing out the silly paradox of burdens – but that doesn’t feel “complete”. And sure, nothing is ever absolutely complete. I could try and condense all of these paragraphs into say, maybe 5 tweets, and that would have a particular effect. So why write a mid-length essay when you could write a short twitter thread instead? First of all, there is some desire, and that desire does not need explanation, and perhaps cannot truly be explained. But it can be fun and interesting to try to explain the desire, assuming it’s done from a place of gentle curiosity rather than authoritarian demand.
Second – now let’s get into the question itself – every medium has its constraints. Even if you wrote an entire essay on Twitter, you can’t control the fact that people who are on Twitter, are on Twitter. Meaning, they read tweets with the expectation that they are reading tweets. Meaning, it’s unlikely that they’re going to really think very hard about it, really immerse themselves in what you’re saying. Sometimes you get lucky and you hit someone with the right thought in the right way at the right time, and they find themselves pausing to really take in what you’ve said. Wonderful.
But Twitter as a medium is not designed for thoughtful reverence. It’s not! And that’s fine! The best thing about Twitter for me is the high rate of social intercourse – the ability to have dozens of conversations simultaneously, quoting one person at another person, inviting friends from all over the planet to join in, witnessing one person’s thought trigger a cascade of thoughts in another. It’s exhilarating. It’s been one of my favorite things to do, which is why I’ve spent so much of my time and energy doing it these past 5 years. I still intend to do it. Twitter is more madman-coffeehouse than church. And while I have been hungrily getting my fill of frenetic activity, and been rewarded handsomely for it, I have been continually also craving the quiet bliss of the wilderness. I miss being able to really hear myself think, the clarity that comes from total stillness and isolation. Which can be a hard-to-afford luxury in the absolute sense – most of us have bills and obligations and so on – but it can be sought out in little pockets. I could sit by the beach for a day with a notebook and a pen and turn off my phone. I can afford that, yet I haven’t done that in a while. I should do that soon. And that’s something else that I just got out of this piece of writing. By sitting at my computer in front of a blank screen and thinking and writing out loud for a while, I’ve arrived at something that feels obvious.
I took a break here and I don’t mind that I did.
// abandoned