Good evening, beloved —
Today I want to spend a little time thinking through a set of issues around competence, or more precisely incompetence.
What does it mean to have trouble acquiring the knack of something? What does it mean to be bad at things? This is obviously an endlessly huge topic, and I’m sure I won’t get very far with it here, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about a good deal these past few days. As you may suspect, this perseveration has its roots in something concrete, which is the trouble I’m having making my fingers do the things I need them for to do in order to make music with a guitar.
Here’s an example: if you want to play “No Fun,” which is an exceedingly simple song, you’ll start by strumming the following pattern: an A chord, twice, followed by G-A-G-A; and then the same thing again, but this time substituting D for A, and C for G. So:
A A G A G AㅤㅤㅤD D C D C DㅤㅤㅤA A G A G AㅤㅤㅤA A G A G A
That’s the gloriously stupid core of the song. That’s it. Music really doesn’t get much easier. There’s only one trouble: I can’t do it.
It takes me a full second, and maybe even a little more, to make my fingers fret the strings that produce a C chord. That’s in the abstract, starting from zero. My performance is even worse when I’m moving from a D to a C and back, twice in a row. Fail to do that, and you absolutely cannot play “No Fun,” at least not at any speed or time signature that garage rock is generally played in, and for that matter you’ll remain unable to play any song that has that particular chord progression.
Part of my difficulty in performing the D-C transition, of course, is that I’ve been playing the guitar for all of two weeks. And part of it is that I’m clearly laboring under that state known in the Zen tradition as “beginner’s mind,” in which an exquisite sensitivity to correct form is purchased at the cost of a certain overcarefulness and rigidity.
But part of why I’m having this trouble, I’m beginning to sense, is that it is a simple consequence of the way my body is in the world. I’m not just talking about being frustrated by my fingers’ reach, though I do also mean that. I mean that my efforts feel like they’re being thwarted by lower-level facts of the body — things like fine motor skills, hand-eye coordination, and even the speed at which the muscles of my fingers contract in response to stimulus.
When you have a hard time learning a skill, in the face of consistent effort, these are the constraints you look to. The degree to which you’re hampered by these initial conditions is what distinguishes skill, the fruit of hard and diligent training and effort, from talent, the domain of “gifts.” It’s particularly frustrating to reckon with the idea that at least some achievements, even ones that the gifted are likely to regard as trivial, will remain beyond reach, no matter how much you’re willing to work at them. Simply and brutally, some skills cannot be acquired with any amount of practice, however diligent.
What I’m wrestling with now is the fear that even the skill of playing the opening guitar line to “No Fun,” as D-U-M dum as it is, is one of them. And all of this before even getting to the questions of keeping time, sight-reading music, reproducing a given note from memory, or even reliably associating a sound at a certain frequency with the name we conventionally give it. (Can you hum an A right now?)
Some of these skills can likely be improved, at least to a certain degree, with great effort. Others strike me as very much being matters of gross neurophysiology — like my faceblindness, no amount of practice is ever going to make a difference.
If even the low plateau of competence represented by “No Fun” does turn out to be beyond my reach, after a few more months of trying, it will of course make me sad. But it won’t seriously derail me, or distort my life chances, and that’s really what I’m getting at here. Ordinary life requires that we achieve all sorts of things — that we accurately gauge the emotional tenor of a room, regulate our expression in response to that tenor, consistently hold our body in certain stereotyped postures for relatively long periods of time, and so on. Competent performance in all of these registers is critical to one’s ability to be perceived and treated as an adult, and even at this late date in history we tend to treat all of these everyday tasks the same way. At the interpersonal level, we don’t generally bother to distinguish which of the demands made on us are the realm of trainable skill, which are dependent on some degree of inborn or deeply acculturated propensity, and which are simply facts of the body that vary along all the axes that human bodies are seen to.
I just want to bash out some dumb garage rock, and honestly, nothing’s going to stop me from doing that. If “No Fun” is denied to me, I’ll just have to satisfy myself with the “Roadrunner” and “Wild Thing” I can already play, and the three-chord canon that’s still open to me beyond them. But the effort of learning to work a fretboard for the first time in my life has already made me aware — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say more acutely aware than ever — of just how much a struggle it can be to make your recalcitrant body do the things it needs to do in order to function as a vehicle for the self. And at that, a struggle that never seems to get any easier, no matter how much you practice.
And inasmuch as what the world demands of us seems to be getting more strenuous all the time, my heart goes out to all those who are not particularly competent in any register at all. It’s actually this that I diagnose under the turn toward authoritarianism these past few years: the world is getting ever more complicated, and we’re not equal to its complexity, and we know it. It unfolds before us in real time, like a tune we can’t really follow and know perfectly well we’ll never learn how to play. Call it the Unnecessariat Blues.
§ One last thing before I go: as you may have heard by now, Mark Fisher evidently lost his battle with depression day before last. Mark was an inspiration for a lot of us, from his writing on k-punk to his stewardship of the Zero Books list, and his Capitalist Realism remains one of the few essential texts of the post-2008 period.
I can’t in all honesty say his decision is completely incomprehensible to me — lately and for all the obvious reasons I’ve been thrown right back into nightmares of the sort I haven’t had in thirty years (last night’s featured region-by-region megadeath tallies being toted up on some War Room big board as they came in), and for all the bien pensant things we’re supposed to say about suicide I sure as hell understand why anyone might come to feel like checking out right about now. But dammit do I ever wish he’d found whatever internal resource he’d have needed to stay and fight alongside us. He’ll be sorely missed. I hope his family, friends and colleagues, and those of you who were touched by his work as much as I was, will accept my heartfelt condolences.
Mark’s great strength as a writer was his ability to map the characteristic affective states we’re pushed into as result of our forced exposure to this thing we call late capitalism, depression chief among them. Now I know full well — both from a thankfully minor degree of personal experience, and more deeply from long and intimate acquaintance with quite a few who have struggled greatly with it — what depression feels like from the inside. I know how it works, what kind of interior landscapes it generates.
And that’s why I know that no amount of “checking in with” or “being there for” someone makes the slightest difference at all, when the overwhelming feeling of being worthless (and in fact actively harmful to everyone stupid enough to love you) takes hold. None of it eases the isolation — in fact, the depression twists any attempt at closeness or support made by those who love us into further unanswerable evidence of our own brokenness.
Reaching out is, nevertheless, what we do when the folks around us are in trouble — because it’s all we can do, because it would be unconscionable to do otherwise, because it’s instinctive in members of our species. I guess this is what I mean when I ask you all to take care of yourselves and each other, and to let others take care of you. We do these things not because they are easy. We do them because they are, almost by definition, impossible, and yet they are all that stands between us and old night. Now more than ever, you have
all my faith,
ag
ldn
This is Dispatch from London No. 69 of Sunday, 15 January 2017, offered to you under the terms of a Peer Production License. You are free to reuse this content, but must acknowledge Adam Greenfield as its author. ◊