A good assistant to your future self

Monday, March 20, 2023

This morning I was flipping through my copy of the Bicycle Sentences Journal that illustrator Betsy Streeter sent me and I was quite taken with this final paragraph by Grant Petersen. (I’m a big fan of his blog and Just Ride.)

He touches on why I keep a diary, why I keep it on paper, and the magic of keeping a logbook. The mundane details can bring back sublime memories, and what you think is boring now may be interesting in the future: “What seems bland when you write it down… will seem epic in thirty years.”

I have a new studio routine where when I’m unsure of what to write about, I revisit my notebooks each year on today’s date. (I have notebooks going back 20 years, daily logbooks going back 15, but I’ve kept a daily diary for 5 years now. That’s where a lot of gems are buried.)

Flipping through these notebooks will usually yield something worth writing about. (This morning, it was William Burroughs on language.)

Reading my diary this way, which I first learned from reading Thoreau’s diary, also shows me the cycles and patterns of my life.

(For example: Cocteau Twins and the beginning of spring are somehow intertwined in my life. What does that mean? And what does the fact that their lyrics are barely understandable mean when matched with the Burroughs? Spring is a season of rebirth… When babies are new, they babble and make noise without language… do they sound like spring to me for this reason? You can see how these thoughts, none of which I had when I woke up this morning, come forth from just reading myself.)

Another way to think about it: Keeping a diary is being a good research assistant to your future self.

This is the advice that art critic Jerry Saltz has tweeted over the years:

Be a good assistant to yourself. Prepare and gather, make notations and sketches in your head or phone. When you work, all that mapping, architecture, research & preparation will be your past self giving a gift to the future self that you are now. That is the sacred.

I’ve never had an assistant. I am my own best assistant. My assistant-self is my past self loving my future self who’ll need this previous research when I reach for something in my work. My assistant-self has gotten ideas for whole articles, essays from minutes of research online.

Artists: The beautiful thing about giving yourself a little break & not working – those are the times when new ideas flood in from the cosmos & set your “assistant self” in motion, the self that will be there for your “future-self.” Curiosity and obsession always fill the vacuum.

Artists: Be your own best assistant. Do your research. Get your tools and materials in order. These will be the ancestors, spirit guides and self-replicating imagination of your work. This will allow art to reproduce itself in you. You’ll thank yourself during & afterwards.

I have my many moments of self-loathing at my own lack of progress, but one thing I have done right, at least in the past half decade or so: I have been a good assistant to my future self.

Joan Didion said of re-reading notebooks, “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be.” This is especially true if they have bothered to preserve themselves so we can visit them later.

Yes, a diary is a good spaceship for time travel: for meditating on the present, flinging ourselves into the future, and visiting ourselves in the past.

Errors in Western Language

Monday, March 20, 2023

Flipping through an old diary this morning, I found these words copied from an interview in Burroughs and Friends: Lost Interviews. William Burroughs talks about some of the ideas he gleaned from Alfred “The Map is not the Territory” Korzybski’s Science and Sanity:

He pointed out that “either/or” is one of the basic flaws in all Western thinking, like “either intellect or emotion” instead of “both… and…” Because every action is both intellectual and emotional. For example, your cat wakes up and he feels hungry—that’s an emotion, an instinct, but then his front brain goes to work to show him where food has been, there food will be. This is still the basic guiding principle of Hollywood: what has made money will make money. But as soon as that happens, the cat’s front brain is going into operation, taking him to where the food will be—same way with people. So, trying to chop the human body into intellect and emotion… I mean it doesn’t at all correspond to what we know of the human organism and the universe.

So there’s a basic flaw. Another is the definite article, as though it was a permanent: The God, the way, instead of a God, a way. And another is the is of identity, as though this were a permanent status. “He is my servant.” Now, the Egyptian’s glyph: “He as my servant.” At this moment, he is acting as my servant. “The ‘is’ of identity,” Korzybski calls it.

Burroughs attended one of Korzybski’s seminars in 1939. He said in a press conference in 1974, “I think that everyone, everyone, particularly all students, should read Korzybski. [It would] save them an awful lot of time.”

A quick flip-through of Science and Sanity turns up charts like this:

So I’m not sure how much time it’s going to save me. Might have to stick to Wikipedia.

You have to really love your idea

Tuesday, March 14, 2023

I saw a clip of writer Robert Greene talking about creative work that really rang true:

“You have to really love your idea. It has to be something from deep within. It has to be personal. It has to excite you on a deep level. Because you’re going to have to persevere for several years. There are going to be a lot of critics, a lot of mean-spirited people are gonna say, ‘You can never do that!’

When you create anything, the spirit you create it with, the energy, the excitement, is translated into the product itself. So when somebody writes a book just for money, you can kind of smell it. When you read the book, it kind of reeks. We can sense that. But when the writer is excited, it excites the reader. So the love and the desire you put into your project will translate.”

3 additional thoughts on this:

1) I would worry less about mean-spirited people, and worry more about well-intentioned people. The mean-spirited you can ignore pretty easily, but the well-intentioned can actually do much more damage, because you really care what they have to say. This includes agents, editors, friends, colleagues, loved ones, etc.

2) Not only will you have to persevere for many years, if your wildest dreams come true and your project is a huge hit, you have to be ready to talk for years — if not decades! — about it. So at the very least, it better be something you were passionate about at the time of its making.

3) I truly believe that great books are sort of crystallizations of the energy of writer at a certain moment in time and magic happens when the reader’s energy and the writer’s energy sort of unlock each other. (I wrote a little more bit about this in the afterword to Steal — you put all the energy in as the writer, but it’s really the reader’s energy that completes the circuit.)

On preaching to the choir

Monday, March 13, 2023

Maybe because I grew up singing in the church choir, I think a lot about that phrase, “Preaching to the choir.”

The funny thing is that the choir needs preaching, too.

And, for that matter, so does the preacher.

And it turns out that Rebecca Solnit wrote a whole essay on “Preaching To The Choir”:

[T]o suggest that you shouldn’t preach to the choir is to misunderstand the nature of preaching. Conversion or the transmission of new information is not the primary aim; the preacher has other work to do. Classically, the sermon is a kind of literary criticism that regards the key sacred texts and their meanings as inexhaustible. Adults, like children, love hearing the great stories more than once, and most religions have prayers and narratives, hymns and songs that are seen as wells of meaning that never run dry. You can go lay down your sword and shield by the riverside one more time; there are always more ways to say how once you were blind and now can see.

Or, this line, which a reader sent me: “We preach to the choir so they’ll sing.”