Good afternoon, beloved -
One of the things that the passage of time grants — or at least I’m pretty sure it’s time, and the simple accumulation of a certain amount of experience with the self — is a measure of reflexivity about how your own mind works.
You learn to recognize which situations will be productive and healthy for you, and which likely to send you spiraling into abyssal basements of self-loathing. You evolve a sense for where your actual talents lie, where a bit of sweat equity may help you develop some increment of competence, and which areas of endeavor are bound to resist any and all attempts to acquire ability, facility or skill.
Between the set of undertakings at which you’re naturally gifted and those you’re simply not very good at (and most likely never will be) lies the terrain of application. And though it’s surely always going to be difficult to determine just where the boundaries of this terrain lie, on either side, my desire to put at least some pins in the map has nevertheless assumed a redoubled urgency lately. What’s been preoccupying me, in particular, is the question of whether or not the ability to notice is subject to application of effort — in short, whether it’s truly possible, at my age, to learn how to see.
The reason this has become so urgent has a great deal to do with the fact that I’ve finally signed the contract for my next book (sadly not actually at Bar Italia, as I’d intended for reasons of mythic resonance, but at the rather less interesting Milkbar), and am now obligated to produce it. Of course I was always going to write again, here with you if not in print and in public, but being on the hook contractually has a certain way of focusing the attention. This book is going to happen, when it appears in the world it will do so as a Verso offering, and that red “V” inscribed on its spine means a certain minimum threshold of readers will encounter it. And with that understanding comes another chance to get things a little less wrong, and maybe even a little closer to right.
For me there are three dimensions of this aspiration (or ambition, whichever it may be): cogency, timeliness and writerly craft. I want my arguments, first of all, to make sense; to be relevant to at least one among the central challenges we collectively face at this moment in history; and to be couched in language as elegant as possible, both structurally and expressively. And of these three registers of performance, it’s the last where my footing feels most unsure, by far. I know, without question, that I’m writing about something important. However arrogant it may be, I even feel like I can bring some new ideas to the table, or at least arrange the existing contributions of others in a configuration that renders them newly useful. But I’m not at all certain that I’ll be able to do what I so badly want to, which is to accomplish all of this with wit, verve and style.
Now I’m afraid wit, per se, just isn’t ever going to be mine to claim — there’s that bit about knowing your limits. I’ll just never be able to turn out the mordant asides that just pepper a book like Daniel Immerwahr’s (fantastic, highly-recommended) How To Hide An Empire, and it’d be an awful, terrible thing to see me try. And verve? That’s something that generally emerges iteratively from successive rounds of revision, or at least can do if you’re lucky enough to find an editor as rigorous and as committed to the suppleness and muscularity of your prose as you are yourself. So really what remains is the question of style.
As to whether or not literary style as I understand it, and of the specific type I aspire to, can ever be acquired — well, it’s this that brings us back to the primacy of perception, of noticing, and of whether the ability to notice is something you’re born with or can learn to do better.
Consider this whimsical, bifurcated account of a daylong ramble at the sea-margin, as rendered by two very different writers known for their attention to the practice of walking. Both halves of the piece are maybe a little overwrought; Self, in particular, is here verging on self-parody. But what I fix on in each offering is the precision of the language, and particularly each writer’s painstaking care for the language that orders things: as they walk, they see, and what they see they classify. Never mind for a second any half-remembered (and in any event only ever quarter-understood) ideas about the Deleuzian repetition of difference; for the moment let’s posit both that there actually are stable-ish categories to which individual things in the world can be said to belong, and that the fact of belonging to that category in turn tells us something interesting about the thing and the world. In order to establish such a taxonomy, of any sort really, you need to have the ability to distinguish the things you encounter in the world one from the other. You need names. And to name a thing is first of all to have the ability to attend to that thing in its specifics. For me, anyway, it’s this specificity that gives so much of the writing I love its texture, its tooth and flavor. Self and Macfarlane’s conjoined account of their day walking the strand is given by far the greater part of whatever power it possesses by their ability to name the things they encounter not as generic “rocks” or “birds” or “buildings” but as a Martello tower, a hunk of ferroconcrete, a xenolith, a wren flitting about a stand of elder.
These, after all, are the qualities that define the place where they happen to be walking as a British shore, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and not somewhere and -when else. In their absence, all you have is a schematic, and not a particularly interesting one at that: two guys met up, walked along the beach, ate some food along the way. The whole thing turns (if indeed it turns for you at all) on the powers of recognition each writer brings to their account of the walk. But what did it take to recognize each of the things they encountered as such?
This knack for the seeing and the naming of things isn’t simply naturalistic, either. The ability to recognize certain objects and paradigmatic situations makes of them compact shibboleths of culture and breeding: think of what’s bound up in spotting an Opinel knife, in seeing in the work of an artist the travails of Penelope or Scheherazade. Of course being able to decode these references in turn implicates me too in the structures of privilege involved in the acquisition of knowledge, and indeed the undoing of this fabric of shared referents causes me not a little bit of despair, in a world where the people I meet are increasingly likely to get their moorings not from common folk culture but from IP — and at that, IP I don’t and almost certainly won’t ever consume. (I can tell you what it means to be compared to Penelope. But what does it mean to be like Thanos or a Targaryen or a Hufflepuff? Please believe me when I promise you this isn’t any kind of performative snobbery on my part, but I have no fucking clue.)
This unfolds more happily, too. In The Mushroom At The End of The World, for example, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing identifies and defines a process she perceives at work in the world as “salvage accumulation,” and once you’ve read her description you see it everywhere you go. In fact most thoughtful writing does this, and in its presence you twig to a double articulation, or a kind of reciprocating cycle between perception and description: in order to describe something, it’s clear that the writer must first have been able to see it, but should they succeed in rendering a description of it, they can convey that knowledge to you enciphered in a packet of language, and forever after you’re able to see for yourself something you couldn’t before. At the very least they’ve sensitized you to the fact of salient difference, and you can go explore that fissure further on your own if you’re so moved to.
So very much of this understanding of the world is founded on tacit knowledge, though, which is to say — and this is a subtle point — that some meaningful dimension of difference is made explicit only in the choice of one descriptor over another. It becomes evident at the level of skilled representation, but it’s not present in untutored primary experience. The newcomer to a context looks outward and sees a bird, not a wren or a finch; a bunch of immigrants picking mushrooms in a forest, not salvage accumulation. As Giles Lane reminds me, the understanding of relevant detail has to be “acquired through doing, to ‘attending to’ things.” Which is well and good…if you have the cognitive wherewithal to attend in the first place.
Bringing this tale full circle, I’ve come to suspect that one of the things that I’m simply not very good at is precisely this ability to see meaningful difference. And what terrifies me is the very strong possibility that this is a cognitive limitation, something that will place permanent bounds on my development as a thinker, a writer and a human being. If I can just about distinguish a shelduck from a coot, an oak from a birch, or an Opinel from a Laguiole, it’s in all cases because the latter term in each comparison has some dimension of difference about it that’s obvious, verging on egregious. (The coot’s black plumage and white bill, the silvery-white bark of the birch, the compound, tapering curve of the Laguiole’s handle, and so on.) But god forbid I should ever have to account for anything subtler than that, or above all correctly distinguish concepts and other things that lack concrete qualities to be grasped.
On my theory, specific words may be what gives good writing its grain, its bite and much of its pleasure. But as a writer, you can’t use the words unless you know them, and you won’t know them unless you’ve recognized that there’s a distinction to be registered in the choice of language in the first place. Hope, then — for my sake at least — that perception does after all turn out to be something that can be cultivated and raised to a higher degree of resolution.
This week I’m reading Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees and Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing, both of which are wonderful in different ways, and are unquestionably to be numbered among things that have helped me to see. So far as travel goes, Tuesday will find me in Copenhagen for a few days to give some talks, and then I’m back in London to begin work on the new book in earnest. And for whatever it’s worth, for the next little while I’ll once more be doing my damndest to get you these dispatches on a regular weekly basis. (Drop a line, at that, if you’re a new or even semi-recentish subscriber — I like to have an idea who I’m writing to and for.)
solid,
ag
ldn
This is Dispatch from London No. 87 of Sunday, 19 May 2019, 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.