Raison d'être
Terribly Painful, Incredibly Dumb
Update: I have been rewriting this piece with Claude on and off since I initially published it. I am floored by the quality and utility of its suggestions during the writing process. I need to write a tack-on piece about it.
Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one–the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts,…Your affectionate uncle, Screwtape.1
Start
I sit here pulling teeth to sound respectable to an audience of one, but mostly I sit here sitting. Why am I here at this keyboard anyway? I can’t shake the feeling that I could be doing something else, something less self-indulgent and crass. I could file this mental paperwork away indefinitely and be free of the responsibility. I had forgotten the unpleasant background noise that echoes off a wall of self-doubt. I had forgotten how quickly bargaining can turn into apathy and inaction. But by choosing that, over and over again, a colony of spiritual mildew spreads unchecked and unafraid. This will get easier with practice, but today it is hard.
Technology
You ran a brute force search on a sorted list?2
This is my place to be a novice. To be a master of none without the self-doubt that comparison makes. I find great joy working with technology, and I have previously had that joy all but extinguished. I want to keep a record of my rabbit holes a: Look, sidenotes , and to have a personal index when I need to clarify something previously murky. It will be self-indulgent, but I hope that it will be useful as well. I don’t know what I’m doing yet, but I will follow the beat of the drum.
Writing
I’m hiding behind technical writing. We are told to write what we know and, presently, what I know best is technology and its adjacencies. But that isn’t all that I know, and this blog exists to be What I Know, or at least What I Think I Know. I find myself often jotting down notes of half-baked, hardly entertained ideas expecting them to be teeming with alien life and novelty. But mostly they’re not, and I think that writing might encourage me to be more discerning and less gullible.
I’m foolish to worry that my ideas will come out unpolished and ugly. Many will, and I’ll be the intellectual progenitor of each and every one of these misshapen Frankenstein figurines. This misfortune is of course solitary, but I still worry that I risk sounding barouque without cause. A windbag talking to the wind. But this self-same worry has proven fertile ground for self-sabotage and “I’ll get back that”’s. I’d like to do away with this tendency. If I’m lucky, I’ll get rid of the bloviating and belly-aching too.
I want to draw on this ethos from David Foster Wallace’s E Unibus Pluram:
Entirely possible that my plangent cries about the impossibility of rebel- ling against an aura that promotes and attenuates all rebellion says more about my residency inside that aura, my own lack of vision, than it does about any exhaustion of U.S. fiction’s possibilities. The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of “anti- rebels,” born oglers who dare to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse single-entendre values. Who treat old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point, why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk things. Risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. The new rebels might be the ones willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “How Banal.” Accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Credulity. Willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows. Today’s most engaged young fiction does seem like some kind of line’s end’s end. I guess that means we all get to draw our own conclusions. Have to. Are you immensely pleased.3
So this is my challenge. To shirk “The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation.”4 To write earnestly, without the saturated irony that self-doubt breeds, about what I know. To forego the need to defend Why I Am Here at all. To keep my cloaks and daggers orderly and locked away. To be vulnerable and curious. Or maybe I’ll stick to computer-stuff. Time will tell.
I am writing because I feel dissatisfied without it. I want to struggle and swear and pull teeth. I want it all. Enjoy.
Mankind, ignorant of the truths that lie within every human being, looked outward–pushed ever outward. What mankind hoped to learn in its outward push was who was actually in charge of all creation, and what all creation was all about.
Mankind flung its advance agents ever outward, ever outward. Eventually it flung them out into space, into the colorless, tasteless, weightless sea of outwardness without end.
It flung them like stones.
These unhappy agents found what had already been found in abundance on Earth—a nightmare of meaninglessness without end. The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.
Outwardness lost, at last, its imagined attractions.
Only inwardness remained to be explored.
Only the human soul remained terra incognita.
This was the beginning of goodness and wisdom.5