its a friday night, almost 11pm, and i felt the urge to pace my house and write. my 2yo toddler is still awake. i borrowed my wife’s phone. i gotta try to make this quick. its raining. i had to shut the kitchen windows. im in my new house. theres a lot more room to pace. i used to pace this really narrow stretch of space between my living room and my kitchen at my last place. now i have more space than before, which opens up broader pacing opportunities. im quite excited about this.
i actually started pacing before i started writing, which answers the chicken-egg question. i was shutting my windows and i noticed an apple core that i had tossed into the kitchen sink earlier in the afternoon, with the intention of getting rid of it later in the day. it struck me that i was surprised to see it, meaning i had, in the few hours that i had been out (walking to the beach with my family, getting dinner, doing some errands), forgotten about it. this by itself might not be particularly notable, but today its reminding me that i dont have a very good memory for this sort of thing. there are some things that i am good at remembering, like twitter threads i have written- though i cant always remember *when* id written them. its more like recognition than recall. now as i pace into my study i recognize that i have a book ive been meaning to read- the art of memory by frances yates. maybe i’ll finally get around to reading it soon. i used to feel some vague sort of guilt about not reading the books ive been meaning to read, but ive come to be more relaxed about it now. i now see it as: a book requires a certain amount of “activation energy” for me to get around to reading it, and guilting myself does very little to move that needle. i wrote a post about this once (soften the ground).
anyway the thing ive been triangulating towards is… i havent been writing much in recent months, which i think has been good for me. ive been spending more time with my family and just sitting around staring at trees, and kinda inhabiting slower, longer, older waves of thought and feeling, which feel pre-verbal or sub-verbal. its challenging to put into words, but thats the task of a writer, to articulate what is hard to articulate, so maybe i’ll try. maybe later.
forgetting is a part of remembering. this can sound like some trickster wordplay, but theres a way in which its straightforwardly true. time is a tool. the things that decay from memory are typically not that salient or not that important. was the apple core important, though? there’s a sense in which it isnt, and a sense in which it is. what im trying to get at though is that it doesnt actually matter if i remember the apple, if i give myself ample opportunity to rediscover it. so space is also a tool. time and space are both tools. they are both important parts of the process, important parts of the wider canvas that any artist or creative works on.
for as long as i can remember, ive had some concerns about memory, and time, and space. i always felt like i wasnt quite inhabiting the world the way i wanted to be inhabiting it. i think my twitter threads from 2018-2024 or so can be thought of me coping with that, using cyberspace as a kind of prosthetic, a kind of memory palace
who is a termite to build a mound? who is a beaver to build a dam? who am i to build a hypertext library?
as i stare at the trees and water, ive been questioning my relationship with media, with the internet. in some ways, cyberspace saved me. in some ways, it ruined me. i suppose anybody who devotes a lot of themselves to anything might be able to say that. and oftentimes it seems like the measure of it all is what they produce out of it. if van gogh ruined his life for his paintings, well at least they are gorgeous paintings that echo through space and time. imagine another van gogh with the same life story, except his paintings are also shit. we debate the lives of great artists who lived questionably, but theres not much debate when the artist is shit.
i dont know if ill ever produce “great work” – and lately ive been in a season of feeling like i shouldnt really try, that my past efforts have been mistaken and mislaid. but if i know myself at all- and im taking very seriously the possibility that i really dont- i believe i will feel the itch and urge to make better attempts. im only 35 and i have decades more to spend trying to get better at writing. in my spare time lately ive been playing more chess and more tetris, and i dont have any hope of ever getting seriously good at those things, but still i do have an interest in getting better. writing is my vocation. my interest in getting better at writing supercedes almost everything else, except currently my interest in being a better husband and father. and then theres the question of, does interest suffice? what does it really mean to have an interest in something? how do you actually get better at something, and not just end up staging a very elaborate theatre production of trying, of being seen trying?
i know the intellectual-verbal answer to this, which is that you must produce works or acts that demonstrate the effort, and then examine them honestly and evaluate them for signs of progress. you could describe this as a sort of applied scientific method, or a system of deliberate experimentation. and the important thing is to have some component of this that exists in material reality, or external reality, such that its not purely a matter of personal sentiment, since sentiment can change depending on one’s mood, attitude, fashion, a passing influence, etc.
when i look back at my failure(s) as a creative in my life, almost all of it seems to boil down to the fact that i tried to do too much in my head. i convinced myself that i was saving time, or i was sparing myself pain, and i now see that it was all tedious rationalization- there is no escaping some degree of discomfort when producing imperfect works en route to manifesting one’s vision.
so this is me, somewhat refreshed and renewed, approaching my work with a fresh attitude. its not my job to produce great work, not exactly. i was swept up in a knotty tangle of ego and expectations and fear and anxiety and it choked the life out of any work i did attempt to produce. and the consequences of that rippled across the rest of my life in ways that i am still coming to terms with, and refusing to tolerate moving forward. so here i am renewing my commitment to producing imperfect work- a somewhat strange commitment to make, since all work is imperfect (orwell went so far as to say that every book is a failure, and he was right. and implicit in that is that failure is, frankly, not that bad! its not the end of the world! in fact it is the only possibility! and the best we can do is move lightly, earnestly from failure to failure with undiminished enthusiasm!). i cannot be perfect, and im not even sure anymore if i can be clever or interesting. but i can be earnest and honest, i can make decent attempts, and i can put them out there and endure whatever happens. id much rather endure criticisms and mockery than spend another interminable length of time frozen in place, doing nothing (and not even the good kind of nothing). and i hope my memory of this moment persists. but if it doesnt, its on me to use my time and space to construct the necessary memorials to help me. if nothing else, i know to keep pacing.