Reading like a bird of prey

Thursday, April 29, 2021

William James said that our stream of consciousness, “like a bird’s life, seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings.”

I wonder if our reading life — that is, for those of us who read to write — isn’t like a bird’s life, too.

Swoops and perches.

“Like most writers, I don’t educate myself sequentially,” says the poet Gary Snyder, “but more like a hawk or eagle always circling and finding things that might have been overlooked.”

In Emerson: Mind on Fire, Robert Richardson writes that Ralph Waldo Emerson read “like a hawk sliding on the wind over a marsh, alert for what he could use.” Emerson read to “nourish and to stimulate his own thought.”

“The glance reveals what the gaze obscures,” Emerson wrote. “Somewhere the author has hidden his message. Find it, and skip the paragraphs that do not talk to you.”

So the reader/writer hunts like a hawk or an eagle, but then, after we devour books, we must be like the owl: “Keep only what is useful. Regurgitate the rest.”

We love because we care

Monday, October 12, 2020

Here is a collection of posts from artist Amy Meissner — one of my favorite follows on Instagram — advertising a mending and clothes repair workshop she helped run in Anchorage, Alaska, before the pandemic. They all have the same caption: “Mend a thing.”

Here’s something she said about the workshops that has stuck with me:

Once you’ve mended something, if you didn’t have sentimental value attached to it before, then you certainly do once you’ve taken the time to care for it.

“CARE FOR SOMETHING” is the last lesson in my friend Rob Walker’s wonderful book, The Art of Noticing.

He explained in his newsletter:

[O]ne of my favorite responses to a willfully open-ended prompt I give my students — I order them to “practice paying attention” — came from a student who thought he did it wrong. He had made a planter, he explained, for a cactus. He’d done this, he said, on the theory that “by nurturing or caring for something, you pay more attention to it.” And of course he was right! (See also this recent Times Magazine essay making a similar point: “How Taking Care of Houseplants Taught Me to Take Care of Myself.”)

I will try to connect Amy and Rob’s thoughts with a snippet from Keep Going:

“Attention is the most basic form of love,” wrote John Tarrant. When you pay attention to your life, it not only provides you with the material for your art, it also helps you fall in love with your life.

So, while we often think of love as leading to care, care can also lead us to love.

I feel this most deeply with my kids. I’m closest to them when I’m giving them my full, undistracted attention and care. I feel the least love for them when I’m trying to get something else done, or I’m wishing I was elsewhere. (There must be a connection here to John Cage’s formula: If we ignore noise, it disturbs us. When we listen to noise, we find it fascinating.)

In her book, The Gardener and the Carpenter, Alison Gopnik advocates for abandoning the word “parenting” as a verb. She encourages readers to think of being a parent as a relationship that runs on love, instead of a job that runs on work.

“Love doesn’t have goals or benchmarks of blueprints,” she writes, “but it does have a purpose.” The purpose of loving children is to care for them as a gardener would tend to plants, creating the conditions under which they will thrive.

This caring, she says, changes us, and deepens our love. “We don’t care for children because we love them,” she writes, “we love them because we care for them.”

This sentence has profound implications for parents and caregivers of all kinds. (Including children caring for aging parents.) I’m not even sure if the sentence is true, but I want it to be, and if it isn’t true, it is a useful fiction, because it encourages us to do the verb, first — not to wait on the deep feeling before we care, but to care first, and if the feeling comes it comes, but if it doesn’t, at least we’ve cared.

Gary Snyder once said he didn’t think talking about “doom scenarios” were very effective when it comes to changing people’s behavior. “The first step, I think… is to make us love the world rather than to make us fear for the end of the world. Make us love the world… and then begin to take better care of it.” I’m thinking of this now, and wondering if the first step is to perform an act of care — to mend, to repair, to darn, to sew, to patch, to heal — and then the love will come.

Or maybe it’s not directional at all, but an endless cycle:

Finding your way with maps

Thursday, October 4, 2018

Illustration from a vintage Hammond Atlas

I love maps. I love looking at maps and I love thinking about maps and I love collecting maps.

When I was studying at Cambridge, I was writing essays for my tutor about Dickens and Dostoevsky, and they were just awful. I think my tutor thought I was a moron. (Or just an American student. Same thing.) Then one day I came in with a rough hand-drawn map of the London in Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend. He said my scribbled map was the best work I’d done.

I knew then, I think, that my talent was going to be for using pictures and words together, and maps would serve as useful inspiration. A decade ago, I published a blog post collecting a bunch of fictional maps, and I’m thinking of them again, thanks to a beautiful new book, The Writer’s Map: An Atlas of Imaginary Lands.

David Lynch’s map of Twin Peaks, from Nigel Holmes’ *Pictorial Maps*

A few bedtimes ago, both the 5-year-old and I were just lying in his bed looking at maps and talking about him. A rare moment of bliss. (His book was entitled, simply, Maps.)

A while back I read an article about how to you have to get children to fall in love with the world before you ask them to save it. (Gary Snyder: “The first step, I think… is to make us love the world rather than to make us fear for the end of the world. Make us love the world… and then begin to take better care of it.”)

Part of the author’s research was looking at maps children of different ages make of their worlds. He describes the cartography of the different age groups:

From ages four to seven, children’s homes fill the center of their maps, and much of their play is within sight or earshot of the home. Children often describe the worms, chipmunks, and pigeons that live in their yards or on their blocks, and they feel protective of these creatures.

From eight to eleven, children’s geographical ranges expand rapidly. Their maps push off the edge of the page, and they often need to attach extra pieces of paper to map the new terrain they are investigating. Children’s homes become small, inconsequential, and often move to the periphery of the map. The central focus in their maps is the “explorable landscape.”

From 12 to 15, the maps continue to expand in scope and become more abstract, but the favored places often move out of the woods and into town. Social gathering places such as the mall, the downtown luncheonette, and the town park take on new significance.

As Michael Chabon once put it, “Childhood is a branch of cartography.”

Jean Michel-Basquiat’s directions to a collector’s house

Here’s Rebecca Solnit talking about why she loves paper maps (author of, among other books, A Field Guide to Getting Lost and Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas):

Maps are ubiquitous in one sense, and completely missing in another. A lot of younger people don’t own maps and atlases and don’t have the knowledge a map gives you. We call things like MapQuest and Google Maps on your phone interactive… but are they? Are they interactive? It’s a system that largely gives you instructions to obey. Certainly, obedience is a form of interaction. (Maybe not my favorite one.) But a paper map you take control of — use it as you will, mark it up — and while you figure out the way from here to there yourself, instead of having a corporation tell you, you might pick up peripheral knowledge: the system of street names, the parallel streets and alternate routes. Pretty soon, you’ve learned the map, or rather, you have — via map — learned your way around a city. The map is now within you. You are yourself a map.

Many of my favorite artists use maps in their work. Saul Steinberg is famous for his view of New Yorker provincialism, but he drew tons of other maps, including the one above, which was never actually published in his lifetime. Beautiful.

“Maps are arguments,” says Denis Wood. Maps tell stories. (They can also lie.)

Years ago, I found this online migration map that shows you how people move in and out of different counties.

Three maps that tell three stories.

The top map is Cleveland, where I used to live. Everybody’s leaving. It looks like an explosion.

The middle map is Austin, where I live now. Everybody’s moving here. It looks like a black hole.

The bottom map is Pickaway County, Ohio, where I grew up. Hardly anyone leaves. Hardly anyone moves in. It looks like a puddle.

A “beat map” of Phil Collins’ “In The Air Tonight” by Owen Silverwood

I’m interested in how maps can move beyond geography towards mapping other things in the world. Here’s one of my favorite maps of all-time, from a 2005 Harper’s:

I love looking at those diagrams and thinking about the stories behind them. (For example, where is the single dots, depicting the virgins?)

Just this week I became obsessed with the plot maps on the back of new editions of the Choose Your Own Adventure series:

Around the same time I got interested in maps, I discovered “mind mapping,” and started making my own mind maps of the books I was reading:

my map of Edward Tufte’s *Beautiful Evidence*

When pictures and words are laid out in the same space — broken out of the linearity of normal type — you can see new relationships between them and come up with new ideas. I find this kind of drawing with pictures and words to often be way more powerful than simply writing longhand.

Map from Victor Papanek’s *Design for the Real World*

Years ago, I read Peter Turchi’s Maps of the Imagination, and it had a big impact on me. (I later got to interview him about his work.) Turchi suggests that writers are cartographers, in a sense: they help people figure out where they are in the world.

I continue to be taken with this idea. I think of my books as way-finding devices: they show you how to get from where you are to where you want to be.