“ The real enemy of writing is talk.
—
David Malouf, quoted by Salman Rushdie, who adds:
“He warns, particularly, of the dangers of speaking about work in progress. When writing, one is best advised to keep one’s mouth shut, so that words flow out, instead, through one’s fingers.”
This is not true only for literature. I recently read an interview with Stephen Merritt, of The Magnetic Fields, in which he seemed incredibly taciturn, answering questions as concisely as possible and without elaboration. Excited to read interviews with this or that author, I discover that their interviews are almost rudely to-the-point.
I think the above quote explains it: artists, and indeed people inclined to action, know that talk drains us of motivational energy, weakens our will. Talk of ideas makes us feel as though the ideas have been implemented; talk of musical composition processes substitutes for composition; talk of writing uses up the words we need for the writing, diminishing the inspiration we need.
If language is, in some ways, a simulation of reality, then the construction in language of our intentions makes redundant the construction of our intentions in reality. Hence songwriters and painters and writers not wanting to prattle on about their work, their methods, and so on.
(There is also this: any excellent work needs little, if any, explanation; if a painting is meaningless without its curatorial essay on the wall beside it, I consider it a failure: it should have been text).
“ In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would…“cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.
—
Nicholas Carr. I think most already read this surprisingly excellent article, but I think it’s useful to remember how repetitive human history is. New technologies are
always critiqued for their effects on the mind, on our mental and social habits; sometimes, these criticisms are even accurate, but it’s wasted breath nevertheless.
”’[There are occasions when] the men of one generation commit those dreadful mistakes which excite the astonishment and horror of posterity.’ Mill gives two examples of such occasions: the cases of Socrates and of Jesus Christ. To these can be added a third case, that of Galileo. All three men were accused of blasphemy and heresy. All three were attacked by the storm troopers of bigotry. And yet they are, as is plain to anyone, the founders of of the philosophical, moral, and scientific traditions of the West. We can say, therefore, that blasphemy and heresy, far from being the greatest evils, are the methods by which human thought has made its most vital advances.”
Salman Rushdie quotes John Stuart Mill in an essay on the fatwa that followed the publication of The Satanic Verses, a fatwa whose severity is hard now to recall or believe and which springs from a society more successful in its defense of tradition than ours.
In the West, we are all the beneficiaries of revolutionary thought, of radical confrontations between rebels and enforcers of orthodoxy, even those of us who are by nature not radical (myself included). It is interesting that, while most can admit this, we are nevertheless likely to reject additional revolutions, drawing an arbitrary line in history near our births: all revolutions prior to this point I will incorporate into my worldview; any from this point on I reject.
Another way of considering this is to wonder what a modern Jesus would be: into what temples he would charge, what traditions of hierarchy and propriety he would subvert, whose feet he would wash. It is unlikely to be those we’d predict, or it wouldn’t be a revolution.
Lastly, if you’re familiar with these three radicals’ cases, you can’t help but be amused by the degree to which the same themes recur in history: the rejection of Galileo and the combat against Darwin, the struggle against Socrates and the hostility towards contemporary philosophy (with its “corruption of the youth”), and so on.
“ Some other places were not so good but maybe we were not so good when we were in them.
—
Ernest Hemingway, talking of the cities in which he wrote. I haven’t been in a good place or good in this place for a little while, so I’m getting out of town.
I’ll be back sometime next week. Incidentally, this will likely be the first time I’ve ever missed Tumblr posts; I’m obsessive about reading everything on my dashboard and do so each morning and each evening, and don’t think I’ve missed a single post in months.
I’ll try to stay current, but (1) reception is poor and (2) disconnection is partially-sought, partially-feared.
musicbrain:
I haven’t read the original article, but this is one of the most substantial studies about how certain mental health diagnoses, namely ADHD, can be evolutionarily advantageous. To summarize, this study explored a Kenyan tribe which has separated into a nomadic community and an agricultural community. The scientists looked at the DRD4 7R gene variant which is associated with novelty-seeking and other ADHD symptoms. Because it’s the same tribe, there is a similar frequency of this gene in both types of lifestyles. However, the DRD4 7R gene variant correlated with better nutrition in the nomadic portion of the tribe and worse nutrition in the more settled, agricultural lifestyle.
So, the nomads seem to benefit from ADHD-like symptoms. A conclusion from this is that while society promotes natural selection, it shouldn’t dictate what types of genes are beneficial or what types of behaviors everyone should display. It’s also about helping people find their niches since we all have certain environments in which we flourish. With this in mind, perhaps settings for those with ADHD can be tailored to make certain symptoms more advantageous than what they are in standard settings.
This is really fascinating, and something that I’d wondered about bipolar disorder in the past. How did it persist in human evolution, or was it not manifest in earlier times (in which case, why is it so prevalent now)?
My psychiatrist, as always, had an answer.
“ ‘Here we have a man whose job it is to gather the day’s refuse in the capital. Everything that the big city has thrown away, everything it has lost, everything it has scorned, everything it has crushed underfoot he catalogues and collects. He collates the annals of intemperance, the capharnaum of waste. He sorts things out and selects judiciously: he collects like a miser guarding a treasure, refuse which will assume the shape of useful or gratifying objects between the jaws of the goddess of Industry.’ This description is one extended metaphor for the poetic method, as Baudelaire practiced it. Ragpicker and poet: both are concerned with refuse.
