Object, Context, Process, Speed
This summer is shaping up to have a kind of constellation of themes that give it a specific character: Slow progress on an essay, anxiety about eldercare, struggle to get regular physical movement, and resorting to too much of a silly game show to decompress. On Monday, I’ll be adding prep for fall classes to the mix.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about struggling with the thesis of an essay I’m working on for an edited volume on queer theology. After spending a couple of days writing down various versions, none of which satisfied me, I took the approach of sitting down at the computer and just typing “this paper will argue that…” and forced myself to just say it. I couldn’t have done it without the prior attempts, but I got something that I’m 99% happy with and that’s moving me forward. Still, earlier this week, I emailed a friend that “writing is torture these days.” This followed another report to someone else that I’d realized I was trying to cram a 300-page book into a 5000-word essay, something that working on the thesis statement made clear. I was trying to hold four separate layers together, and juggling the pieces means I can always see about ten different routes from point A to point B, and each route requires a sacrifice. But yesterday, as I read through my draft, I realized the “torture” of writing stemmed from the fact that all of my work in the last month has been on establishing contexts and I had very little description of the actual object. One of my teachers in grad school noted that I would turn to theory in my writing when I got scared, and it seemed like there was a similar dynamic going on here.
In college, I read enough semiotics to know that signs mean in relation to other signs, with the result that context always shapes - even determines - meaning. So, I’d spend a lot of time thinking about how context matters. When I wrote my first master’s thesis, this tendency baffled my advisors, although when I submitted the final thesis, my advisor said, “oh, I see what you’re doing now. You’re describing something like magnetic fields.” In my second master’s program, my teachers taught me to focus on the object itself. Not to disregard context, but not to get lost in it either. It was in this period that I was assigned an essay about the composer Morton Feldman that went into the difference between a note in its context and a note and its context. It was a distinction that in retrospect perfectly mirrored my larger journey to not bury things in context. So, yesterday I applied this lesson and started focusing my writing simply on describing John Anderson’s song “Seminole Wind” instead of perfecting the paragraphs that were contextual.
In general, I haven’t moved to an organized approach to setting aside time for this essay. Working on in it when I feel like it is doing enough to move things forward. I generally start my day by opening the file and doing something with it. Usually, I’m out of steam in the afternoon. Theoretically, I have lots of time to just throw myself into it and get it done, but I’m allowing myself the tension between “summer is a time to work without distraction” and “summer is a time for relaxation.” So, progress is steady, but slower than I’d like. But then, doing things quickly always causes me anxiety. I got a degree in viola performance as an undergrad and never fully overcame a fear of playing fast - a fear that certainly manifested during my senior recital when I took the fastest movement of Robert Schumann’s Märchenbilder much, much slower than I’d worked up in my practice sessions, a fact I look back on with some disappointment. To loop back to an earlier reference - I also played Morton Feldman in that recital, although my mother was the only person in the room who understood it (neither my viola teacher nor my accompanist saw value in the piece).
Last night, my mother was talking to a friend who had AI write an essay for him, just to see what it could do. It came up with something in about five minutes. The contrast between AI’s quick spitting out of some kind of hallucinatory synthesis and my struggle to get real energy behind my writing process reminded me in a kind of orthogonal way of a tweet a friend sent me earlier this year:
Writing this essay isn’t going fast, but it is bringing pleasure, and a kind of pleasure that combines the pleasure of flow and the pleasure of getting through to the other side of obstacles. The slowness of the process is itself an obstacle to getting on with another, larger, writing project, but since going with an intuitive process and not thinking in a goal-oriented way is actually facilitating getting writing done at all, I’m not complaining about it.
When I think about the process of moving through the writing, I can visualize it as a path through a forest, in which the forest is a general worry about aging parents. I had hoped to spend last weekend in San Francisco, but a family incident made me cancel the trip to make sure that my stepmother had the support she needed to get through a difficult moment. I checked out a couple of books dealing with eldercare to prepare myself better for future incidents - one was a more practical approach, one was a graphic memoir by Roz Chast, my favorite comic, Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant? The worry takes energy, takes some of the excitement out of the summer, but it reminds me that there’s an interesting way in which self-care and other-care can either compete or complement each other. It’s mostly in my role as a teacher that other-care feels like a form of self-care. When I think about my parents, it feels more like a conflict that requires a balancing act. But several people, mostly women, in my Quaker meeting really model lives in which other-care as self-care is a constant mode of being. I think my main point is here is that AI promises a quick way to take creative processes out of the messiness of life. It would be nice to be able to write unencumbered by a general drain of energy that doesn’t have a known end date. The drain is in part uncertainty, in part grappling with the unpleasant reminder that death is coming and that the path toward it is a decline. But that decline doesn’t have to be unpleasant. There’s a series of Taskmaster, which I am still watching much too much of, in which the five contestants get grouped into teams of older and younger contestants. The energy and joy of the younger contestants’ contrasts to the more staid approach of the older contestants’, but the older contestants are clearly having fun in their own way. I can feel my own energy diminish with age and I try to combat it, but I suppose my parents are giving me the gift of reminding me to enjoy the moment more fully instead of trying to live for the future.