Today My Words Are Simple: Trick History

I don’t know the name, but I know it lies closest to your heart.

The artery, the broken child and the shattered bird,
The name whispered in trains and cages.

I don’t know the name, because I’ve heard it before,
Read it in letters
And felt it swimming in my blood;
Swimming against the tides of tact
That could not save it.

It circles the world
And follows me; I see it in the green Midwestern twilight
So the softest summertime makes me cry.

The elegance of bone
Should not be seen through skin.
The understanding of bones’ crunch
Should not be seen in eyes that haven’t seen a decade
Haven’t seen mothers and fathers and siblings
But have seen playmates in pieces.

They stand in front of me, within me,
My past and a band upon my arm:
My past is not my own. I’ll tell you a secret:

I remember a child who looked like a boy
And her name was Stella.
Polish and a proud gaze
The eyes of one who found life and knew it
The eyes of one who tricked history.

Now she’s in black and white
But she’s also in the colors of the news:
Honduras, Yemen, drone strikes or wire,
Technology fading into intent.

Today, my words are simple.
Trick history into giving her life.

Happy Endings

I’ll tell you a secret about happy endings.

Anyone who survives is, in some way, lost to what they survived.
They become composite,
A bloodline of those who still wait for survival.

As long as their lineage,
Their children feel shadows of their parents’ time
Their parents’ beloved whose life turns to grass each spring.

Borges’ Books

Jorge Luis Borges’ writings are known for several reoccurring themes. One of the most distinctive is his matter-of-fact allusions to fictitious books – or perhaps, books that exist only in his mind. 

See Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings.

Jorge Luis Borges is unique, in my mind, as the author of the most compelling books never written. These unreachable, unknowable books – they are always there, at the corner of my vision, the back of my thoughts, the edges of a memory as I search for what or where I’ve read. They have, undeniably, an existence. Yet they have none of the fallibility of the written word: fire and flood can’t destroy them, the critic’s tongue can’t rend them, they are never forgotten on a shelf or at a bus stop or in a waiting room. They are potentially perfect. Instead they fill up the spaces between our fully formed thoughts and memories and that itching, compelling, dreamlike sensation that drives us to search for – to remember – words we never learned. 

The urge to remember is, perhaps, the most obvious of these volumes’ seductions. Most people go through life trying to remember things. The more elusive the memory and the more tenuous the tracks, the more emotion its lack elicits. Worst of all is the uneasy sense that we have forgotten something, but can’t remember what – a memory of a memory. This negative space could be anything, and so over time we may fill it with the things we want the most – space, love, time, home, adventure, praise, power, knowledge. In fact, most of the truly important thought occurs as people try to negotiate the negative spaces in their mind. The heart of both philosophy and theology is found in this sensation of not-knowing. 

I envy Borges’ books in this – to hold the power to reach into another’s heart and make that person aware of desire. These unknown volumes hold desire in its truest sense: unfulfilled (satiation is a different creature altogether), amorphous, and with an edge which defies self-preservation. The edge is the thing; you look over it and feel a familiar rush, the affirmation of life that comes, most reliably, from contemplating oblivion. Borges’ unwritten books are both the rush and the edge, life and its absence, the space you may fill with understanding: world without end. 

Such lack of precision is almost impossible to carry off as a writer. As a reader, it’s as if someone gave you a box filled with Universe: utterly rare, strange, unknowable, and quite possibly a Pandora’s box, both unopenable and unclosable. Such possibility can only result from lack of precision. And yet, as with most boxes, the trick is in the frame: the image of the written word, a book, a precise image which Borges usually alludes to as a carefully-referenced detail within a larger whole. The book is the labyrinth in his perfectly-described garden of prose, the one detail left to chance.  

My love for Borges springs from this: that he understands how great a delusion precision is. It offers the false promise of every sensation nailed into place, yet neither writer nor reader understand what they lose in its service until all alternate possibilities vanish. Precision is the enemy of possibility. Yet both are necessary. Writing and reading both rely on the yin-yang motion between precision and its negative space of forgetting, remembering, and dreaming.

Precision is a place to start – terra firma, the one place you can’t stay if there is to be any story at all. By crafting a space within precision for possibility to abide – by starting with precision and striving towards possibility –  writer and reader become partners in understanding: to remember the things they might forget, to remember the things they didn’t know, and to dream to fill pages never written.

I Dislike Telling Stories

I dislike telling stories. People always say, start at the beginning, and I get lost looking for it. Stories don’t really have beginnings; they’re more like cats. They like to wander in and out as they please, and you’re left picking up small furry corpses and thankful they didn’t bring in a live raccoon this time. As for endings – most people have a pretty good sense of where stories should end. The problem is, they end – and then they continue. It’s like the drive-through scene in Dude, Where’s My Car: “And then? And theeeeen? AND THEN?”. 

I think of stories more like moments of small revelation, piling up. When enough of them accumulate, the mystery or displacement or unease driving your interest in the whole thing collapses like a house of cards into a (hopefully) satisfying sense of resolution…until the accumulation begins again. Call it the Snowdrift Theory of stories.

The trick with revelations and resolutions is they are incredibly subjective. Monsieur Poirot closing a case is, realistically speaking, the middle of five or six other narratives that have likely been going on since about the middle of Dame Agatha’s novel. (Some of my most enjoyed early reading material was Agatha Christie’s murder mysteries. One of my earliest life lessons: Blackmail Never Pays.) One can imagine characters coming home for dinner, chatting over mid-century modern and martinis  – “Oh darling, you’ll never guess what I heard today. It was the stepson all along!” – and then getting back to the all-consuming business of their own storyline. 

So: every story is just a point of view. Call it the Point of View Theory of stories. 

It’s also hard to pinpoint stories because, once you know people for a while, you just hear snippets of their life, fading in and out like a radio station. 

For example. For most of my life, I thought I knew a story in full. A boy grew to the age of 14, ran away, Did Drugs, Became An Alcoholic, Was Saved, married, and lived happily ever after as a carpenter in the mountains of New Hampshire. It was a pretty good story.

After he lived happily ever after, his wife started hearing voices telling her to divorce him. They were separated for a while and then she came back. They lived happily ever after, again. They restored an antique barn. 

After they lived happily ever after, again, he learned he had Hepatitis C. 

His wife said she didn’t have time to take him for blood transfusions. 

He got sicker and sicker. 

His wife, a very loud person, talked about praise and martyrs. 

Sometime in the winter, he died. His family didn’t find out until after he’d been cremated. It felt like he just got lost somewhere in the winter and never came out to springtime. 

The last part isn’t completely true, because it isn’t true to him; that’s not how he would tell it nor want it told. But it’s true to the pain of loss, like dark water under ice, in the silence of wintertime woods. And even that isn’t an ending, because it doesn’t explain how the dark water and the silence now runs through other lives, changing them in small everyday ways. 

Words are different from stories, because words don’t try to give an ending. The purpose of some words is just to help you find a way through. When you’re walking through dark woods, you don’t look to the right or to the left; you look at the path, because if you look away you might lose it. It’s also a bad idea to think too much about where the path goes, either in hope or fear.

From the Point of View Theory, I work with words, rather than stories. I work with words, at the end of stories, outside and around the stories I see, a framework of understanding and a misguided attempt at benediction. I try, over and over, to make some sort of path through the confusion and mess and fear. Faith, hope, and love may abide, but in order to “abide” I have to understand where I am – in the thick of it. 

From the Snowdrift Theory, the cards come together to say something like: I may not see a beginning, and I certainly won’t see an end. Lives and events happen around me, some of which I may be aware of and some of which are beyond my understanding. I try to make a neat framework of understanding, but the system is greater than the system. 

Pay attention to what is in front of you. You may not see it again. Seek to craft a way through that is better than what is on either side, for anyone who may follow behind you. 

Like most stories, this has no true end. But I’ll leave it here. I may wander into it again, like a cat wandering into a kitchen. Or sometime in the future I may again happen on my own tracks, leading into stories for which I can find no beginning or end.

Liquid Sun

I miss the summertime of liquid sun
green watermelon grass, growth unchecked
an afternoon of sudden shade 
…
I want a blue
so deep and rich your mind goes missing
your eyes swim down and down
forgetting the way to up
where sky awaits

The Fine Art of Oracular Precision: A Handout

I’m reading Superforecasting: The Art & Science of Prediction (Philip E. Tetlock). Yes, I feel like an oracle-in-training every time I say it. 

This book has a lot to offer, and a casual reading would unjustly reduce it to the usual one-dimensional bestseller-fluff. At exactly 27% of the way through (according to my library’s app), there’s a 93% chance I won’t finish it in the next 1 day 22 hours before it reverts to its cyber-shelf, en route to the next reader who has it on hold. I’ve already re-requested it. 

I haven’t reached the stuff that turns me into the Oracle (Matrix or Delphi). But I’ve reached an excellent, if brief, discussion on the use of precise language and the translation between quantitative and qualitative communication. My inner Teaching Assistant wants to print it off and hand it out to any undergraduate student I see. 

You lucky reader, you. 

To summarize: Sherman Kent had a PhD in history, and a history at Yale University. In 1941 he left academia for the agency that would eventually become the CIA. He retired from the CIA in 1967, after shaping the field of intelligence analysis through some of the U.S.’s most textbook-worthy Cold War history. 

As someone whose job involved estimating likelihood of the sort of events that could lead to nuclear holocaust, he recognized that he and his colleagues could write a report, agree on the language, and put it in the hands of decision-making officials without ever pinning down exactly how certain they were of their best guesses of likelihood. To address this, he agitated for the use of quantitative definitions of certainty, and produced a table detailing the numerical definition of commonly used qualitative phrases. 

Certainty According to Sherman Kent:

CERTAINTYTHE GENERAL AREA OF POSSIBILITY
100%Certain
93% (give or take about 6%)Almost certain
75% (give or take about 12%)Probable
50% (give or take about 10%)Chances about even
30% (give or take about 10%)Probably not
7% (give or take about 5%)Almost certainly not
0% Impossible

(Source note: The title is mine, the table is reproduced as found in Chapter 3 of Philip E. Tetlock’s Superforecasting. Tetlock cites Sherman Kent and the Profession of Intelligence Analysts, Center for the Study of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, November 2002, p. 55.)

I’ve been collecting notes on the idea of “truth” as applied to writers. Sooner or later it will come spilling out in a post, but for now Mr. Kent’s table will have to stand on its own. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have 83% of a book to finish in the next 1 day 21 hours 32 minutes.

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts! Be sure to share the exact percentage of certainty you have regarding how helpful the above is.

Marushka

From Taking Notes to Entropy

“Note taking.” The consonants convey precision, powered by a carefully methodical mind and a professionalism so rigid you could iron a dress shirt on it. Secretaries, administrative assistants, and paralegals are all note takers. Their reputation puts bleach and .925 silver to shame. Each of these fields is, by definition, someone you can depend on – the sort of person who raises a point of order during the Apocalypse, probably holding up the proceedings for the next several centuries. (This is one explanation for the notoriously, and consistently, delayed end times across religions). 

In short: a person who takes notes is a person who is unfazed by anything, because they know the correct procedure at all times. They do not experience doubt or anxiety. They are impossible to intimidate. And they don’t forget. They’re like Koschei the Deathless in Russian mythology: untouchable, because their impetus is not in them but in their notes. (Koschei habitually hid his life in an egg, but he’d modernize with an iPhone or Blackberry.)

I fantasize about being a person who takes notes. I am not a note taker. I am a person who writes notes. There’s a difference.

The difference is in the method. Note takers organize information as part of a system. I organize information the same way the Big Bang organized atoms: a lot happening in a very short time, and almost everything is still under construction (don’t get me started on the black holes). You can tell when a note taker has written something, because retrieving information is easy. The same cannot be said of the Big Bang or my notes.   

It’s not that I have a bad memory. I am able to remember where a given set of idea-scribbles is across two currently active notebooks, two phone apps, four email accounts (including both sent and draft emails), and three stacks of scratch paper representing the 6 months of work prior to the two current notebooks. Oh, and my pockets. When I’m at work and unable to use my phone, I write ideas on paper and shove them in my pocket for later (or the laundry, whichever comes first). Not nearly often enough, I clean out my pockets and read through all the notes and try to condense them into a typed document, so they’re easier to locate (read: less vulnerable to the washing machine. Hopefully.). 

Earlier this year I became aware of how crucial the act of writing things down is to my development of ideas. Since then, I’ve been stealthily observing my own write-it-down behavior. Aside from the whole Schrodinger’s Cat issue (observation may change the outcome, but the cat isn’t happy either way), I want to understand why I write everything down in hopes of structuring my thought processes towards more reliable productivity (read: stacking the odds for the Inspiration Problem, as discussed in a later post). 

Here’s a metaphor. You’re assembling a jigsaw puzzle, and you’ll come into contact with all the pieces, but you won’t always know it’s a piece when you find it – and the pieces are spread across your lifetime instead of the coffee table. 

Here’s the metaphor, rephrased. I expect myself to create something. Someday, every unusual thought that goes through my head (as judged against both external and internal standards) may be useful, or necessary, for that something. Thus, I write my thoughts down so they won’t escape. 

In the process, this creates another fear – that of incoherence. I have a hard time organizing information into sequence, the before-and-after linearity of a temporal system. What if I never make sense of what I once thought? What if I’m never able to filter, refine, and connect them into something that makes sense or is valuable to others? 

Some people are very good at automatically imposing external structure on internal thoughts. I’m not. It takes a lot of time and conscious effort and feels initially unwieldy, akin to writing Alice in Wonderland using an Excel spreadsheet (of which, given Lewis Carroll’s mathematical background, I’d be interested to see the results). But I believe it’s necessary, because I (or at least part of my brain) believes the subjective experience of thought/idea/emotion is close to meaningless if it isn’t communicated; communication is the only way to add it to the collective human knowledge pool, and even then it’s a gamble. It may vanish in the next world war or computer server crash or book burning frenzy. It may be read by precisely one other person. The one thing I hope to count on is the one thing (alright, one of many) I can never fully comprehend: the process of subtle reinforcements or perceptual shifts through which humans make memories or add knowledge into pre-existing intellectual frameworks. To restate: the way humans add little bits of knowledge into their heads, forgetting about them until they boil back to the surface and tip the balance on some decision. 

There it is again, the theme of forgetting – of losing pieces. Note taking is a precise record of what happened. Writing notes is more about the gaps, the places you piece together what might have happened, what could have happened, and what almost certainly will never happen but should – after the facts have packed up and gone home in despair. It’s an attempt at making a study out of uncertainty. You’ll never catch up; it will always be just out of reach, like your shadow, or breadcrumb trails in a dark forest. That’s the wonder of it. You know where you might have been. You only know Schrodinger’s cat may be alive or… ah, may be napping. I realize the infinite futility: making sense out of chaos, when Entropy is enshrined in the current laws of the current universe. I’ll never see the whole jigsaw puzzle. By the time I know enough to make sense of it, half the pieces have been stolen by my imaginary cat and the roommates have Marie Kondo-ed the rest. But the pieces are still out there, somewhere. They’ve drifted off to visit someone, or something, else. 

As a means of storing a life, it’s not bad. In the stories, Koschei usually dies when they find the egg holding his life. He could take notes from me.

The Ten-Minute Lifetime

What can I do in ten minutes?

I recently – within the last month – realized something. Like most blinding insights, this one seems deceptively obvious. I have been confronted with it (by others) since first grade, and in the years since I have confronted it (on my own) in as many ways as there are threats, rage, and delicious distraction. 

I have a short attention span.

The preceding statement is neither accurate nor precise. The truth is this: when I have a thought – any thought – it’s connected to another thought.

And that thought is…yes. Connected to another – no – three other thoughts, six, twelve, darting caffeinated-hummingbird thoughts. Related, or diverging: it makes no difference.

I call this fractalization, or rabbit-hole thinking.

If I want the thought that started all this mayhem, the Patient Zero (it may be the date of someone’s birthday, or critical insight into an essay, or my new improved plans to clean the kitchen [an ongoing campaign]) – I have to track it down, tackle it, pin it to paper (or text) and carefully move onwards from that point with the greatest of caution, like Hobbits taking a shortcut. 

Having accepted this means accepting that two decades of self-experimentation has not altered the basic way my brain processes information. So I’ve decided not to fight my brain; it’s ill-advised to argue with someone who controls your central nervous system, after all.

Honestly, I don’t even mind that my thoughts play Pinball Wizard. My main frustration at this point is that they don’t give me a little time to catch up – a sort of permanent mental whiplash. But I’ve learned not to expect more than ten minutes of focus. 

To this end, I think with a notebook. I think through handwriting – cursive, preferably, the rhythm of loops and dashes acting as a sort of resistor to crackling tangents. I cover the page and I put down everything, drawing lines between sections in classic conspiracy-theorist style until the page looks like a bowl of spaghetti minus the sauce. 

All these written notes move to the computer, and I start rearranging them, chopping and splicing and cutting and resuscitating (lightning rods involved only rarely). 

When ten minutes looms (like midnight), I step back and try to view the writing as a system. What acts on it? What does it act on? What, logically, should be related to it? What can I safely say is always external to the system? Are there patterns, does it remind me of anything? If so, trace why. If need be, return to the notebook. 

The important thing is this: I finally understand that there are different types of focus. Reading (taking in information) is different from brainstorming (making connections), and both of these are different from writing (producing, making new thoughts, “adding value”). It is to writing, specifically, that the ten-minute window applies. 

Thus, if I want to produce anything meaningful I have to give myself time. Together, these three types of focus are part of a larger system of thought, always humming along in the background. It can take a while (sometimes years) for new additions to be integrated, assimilated, the changed meaning they give the whole understood. Like Shiva, the line between creation/chaos is “yes.” Unlike Shiva – with instantaneous-infinity to work with – my thoughts have a ten minute lifetime.

Share thoughts on focus, fractals, and thought-wrangling!

Marushka

Manifesto of a Recovering Perfectionist

“When something is perfect, it’s like a gem. It just hangs there, it’s smooth and there’s nothing to, to sink your teeth into…”

Author Christopher Paolini, from a lecture given at the Austin Public Library, Austin, Texas, 2/28/2019

I free myself from being exceptional.
I free myself to treat my efforts with good faith, and to make my efforts in good faith.

I will pay attention to hesitations.
I will seek the roots of hesitations.
I will have patience and compassion for my slowness.

I will let myself break things.

I will let myself acknowledge ineptitude, not with self-deprecation but with self-honesty – nothing more, nothing less.

I will let myself see success when I have made a step forward.
I will let myself see steps forward.

I will accurately understand my attention span.
I will design tasks for my attention span.
I will be patient with my brain. I will let it show me it’s strengths.

I will step back from self-consciousness, and replace it with honesty.

Does my work have purpose? Does my work fulfill that purpose?
Is my work fulfilled?
Am I fulfilled?

Perfection is unnecessary.
Perfect.

Dead Pan

Writing became easier when I realized: mine is a morbid muse.

I can’t help it. Sex, death, and disgust are the things people remember best. I have too much gag reflex for the third, and too little suspended disbelief for the first – so you see what I’m left with.

It doesn’t help that a lot of my relaxation reading revolves around culinary topics, so when I try to use “active language” it is liberally sprinkled with verbs like cut, chop, dice, and sauté. (I frequently self-edit injunctions to “add a splash of…”.) Fortunately my distaste for outright gore rescues me from Hannibal Lecter territory; mine is a “dry” kind of death. Deadpan, if you will… and probably with a splash of sherry.

Recipes welcome in the comments!

Marushka