Poison sniffers

Sunday, July 18, 2021

“Prescriptive rules are among the least interesting things about language,” writes Christopher Johnson in Microstyle: The Art of Writing Little. “They remind me of a scene from the Disney/Pixar animated film Ratatouille, about Remy, a gifted rat who longs to be a gourmet chef.”

His father, who neither understands nor appreciates his aspirations, puts him to work as the rat colony’s official poison sniffer. Though Remy has an uncanny ability to identify subtle ingredients in complex dishes, his job is to detect the mere presence or absence of poison in scraps of scavenged food. His work helps the rat colony but provides none of the joy he gets from cooking.

Johnson says “prescriptivists” or “Cute Curmudgeons” — people who are interested in only policing usage and grammar rules — are “linguistic poison sniffers.” They turn language into “a source of potential embarrassment rather than pleasure.”

Johnson sees his job as getting people to love and appreciate language by being curious about and paying attention to “what makes language delicious.”

This reminded of Olivia Laing’s distinction between identifying poison and finding nourishment.

Everywhere you look these days, there are lots of poison sniffers, but very few cooking a delicious meal…

I’m not languishing, I’m dormant

Monday, April 26, 2021

“Plants may appear to be languishing simply because they are dormant.”
—Oxford Dictionary of English

A number of friends and colleagues have linked to Adam Grant’s piece, “There’s a Name for the Blah You’re Feeling: It’s Called Languishing.” In psychology, Grant says, “we think about mental health on a spectrum from depression to flourishing,” but a “term was coined by a sociologist named Corey Keyes” that describes the “void” in between them: “languishing.” It’s a state in which, Grant says, you’re not totally burned out, but you’re not full steam, either.

“Psychologists,” says Grant, “find that one of the best strategies for managing emotions is to name them.” But one has to remember that naming doesn’t just describe the world, it creates the world, too. As Brian Eno says, “Giving something a name can be just the same as inventing it.”

We tend to see what we’re looking for, so if you hear the name for something, you start seeing it everywhere, and your eyes get trained to see that particular thing, while you miss everything else. (That’s why Paul Valery said that real seeing “is forgetting the name of the thing one sees.”)

There’s also a danger that when you hear a term that sort of describes what you’re feeling, or seems right, you’ll be satisficed, and say, “Good, enough,” accept the term, and move on.

I disliked the term “languishing” the minute I heard it.

I’m not languishing, I’m dormant.

Like a plant. Or a volcano.

I am waiting to be activated.

consulting my American Heritage Dictionary

“Nature is a language / Can’t you read?”
—The Smiths

I feel very lucky to be married to a gardener, because gardening gives us rich metaphors for creative work that we don’t get from our business-focused productivity-obsessed culture. (I dedicated the last chapter of Keep Going, “Plant Your Garden,” to seasons and cyclical time.)

Over at Brain Pickings, Maria Popova posted a lovely meditation on a passage from Olivia Laing’s essay about Derek Jarman from her book, Funny Weather:

Gardening situates you in a different kind of time, the antithesis of the agitating present of social media. Time becomes circular, not chronological; minutes stretch into hours; some actions don’t bear fruit for decades.

Gardeners not only develop a different sense of time, they develop the ancient wisdom of knowing when to do things:

To every thing there is a season,
and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up…

a collection of Google Image Search results for dormant plants

It seems to me that the reason that so many of us feel like we’re languishing is that we are trying to flourish in terrible conditions. It is spring outside — or the “unlocking” season — but it is still “Winter in America,” and, as any gardener knows, if you try to wake a plant out of dormancy too soon, it will wither, and maybe die.

For example: take the mountain laurels in our backyard. One of them died from the terrible ice storm. The others have put out leaves, but not blossoms. They’ve sensed that this year is not the year to create anything new. They’re waiting for better conditions.

I’m not languishing because I’m not trying to flourish.

image of Claude Debussy in his garden — Claude Debussy in his garden

“Barren days, do no planting.”
—The Farmer’s Almanac

It is a mistake and a misreading of nature to think that you, a living creature, will be flourishing all the days of your life.

My friend Alan Jacobs recently wrote about his exhaustion, and pointed to the work of a new favorite writer of mine, historian Ada Palmer, who has documented in several posts the ways famous historical creators have had to put their work on hold throughout history. (And how many a “golden age” is only golden in hindsight.)

For example, Michelangelo, who lost four years of work to a lawsuit:

In his autobiography he’s talking about this lawsuit that arose because of the della Rovere tomb project, in great detail, and then there’s a line that says Michelangelo realized that, while dealing with a bunch of lawsuits and Pope Adrian and such, he’d been so stressed he hadn’t picked up a chisel in four years. Because he spent the entire time just dealing with the lawsuit. (Anyone feeling guilty about being overwhelmed by stress this year, you’re not alone!) And we have four years worth of lost Michelangelo production, because he didn’t do any art that entire time, because he was just dealing with a stupid lawsuit. And that’s not the sort of thing that fits into our usual way of thinking about these great historical figures. We imagine Michelangelo in his studio with a chisel. We do not imagine him in a room with a bunch of lawyers being curmudgeonly and bickering and trapped in contract hell.

Or Isaac Newton, who people have held up as an example of what you can get done during a plague:

The true fact (historian here, this is my period!) is that Newton did theorize gravity while quarantining, but didn’t have library access, and while he was testing the theory he didn’t have some of the constants he needed (sizes, masses), so he tried to work from memory, got one wrong, did all the math, and concluded that he was wrong and the gravity + ellipses thing didn’t work. He stuck it in a drawer. It was only years later when a friend asked him about Kepler’s ellipses that he pulled the old notes back out of the drawer to show the friend, and the friend spotted the error, they redid the math, and then developed the theory of gravity. Together, with full library access, when things were normal after the pandemic. During the pandemic nobody could work properly, including him. So if anyone pushes the claim that we should all be writing brilliant books during this internationally recognized global health epidemic, just tell them Newton too might have developed gravity years earlier if not for his pandemic.

You may, indeed, be languishing, and I won’t try to take that word away from you. (I also don’t disagree with Adam Grant’s two suggestions for dealing with the feeling: “give yourself some uninterrupted time” and “focus on a small goal.”)

Me, I’m dormant.

I may even look dead, but like Corita Kent once described one of her own dormant periods, “new things are happening very quietly inside of me.”

Waiting to burst forth.

Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City

Saturday, January 9, 2021

A moving mixture of personal memoir and art writing, Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City looks at the topic of loneliness by weaving her own story of a rough stay in New York with the work and stories of four different NYC artists: Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, Henry Darger, and David Wojnarowicz.

This is a book you might want to read with a laptop nearby so you can study some of the artworks that come up along the way, even something like Hopper’s Nighthawks, which you’ve probably seen dozens of times, but have you really looked? (Something I never noticed that Laing points out: there’s no visible door to the outside.)

You might also put on this YouTube playlist and pull up this pinboard to get a visual representation of some of the books’ contents:

I read this back in 2016, but I imagine it has a different and maybe even deeper resonance for readers during a pandemic. Not long after finishing the book an acquaintance of mine mentioned that she’d been alone for a couple of weeks recently and sort of forgot what it was like to function in the world, something Laing writes about:

If you are not being touched at all, then speech is the closest contact it is possible to have with another human being. Almost all city-dwellers are daily participants in a complex part-song of voices, sometimes performing the aria but more often the chorus, the call and response, the passing back and forth of verbal small change with near and total strangers. The irony is that when you are engaged in larger and more satisfactory intimacies, these quotidian exchanges go off smoothly, almost unnoticed, unperceived. It is only when there is a paucity of deeper and more personal connection that they develop a disproportionate importance, and with it a disproportionate risk.

This is one of the themes of the book: when you most need intimacy — the opposite of loneliness — not only is it nowhere to be found, but the longer you stay away from it, the less and less you are equipped to bring it about. I would also add that the times you feel like a little disconnection, it’s impossible to get it — there were several times when I was distracted from reading the book by the hollering din of my wife and kids from across the house that I thought, “Gee, a little loneliness — or at least solitude — might be nice.”

Laing quotes from The Philosophy of Andy Warhol:

At the times in my life when I was feeling the most gregarious and looking for bosom friendships, I couldn’t find any takers so that exactly when I was alone was when I felt the most like not being alone. The moment I decided I’d rather be alone and not have anyone telling me their problems, everybody I’d never even seen before in my life started running after me…. As soon as I became a loner in my own mind, that’s when I got what you might call a ‘following.’

In “Open House,” off Songs for Drella, Lou Reed sings of Warhol, “I like lots of people around me… but don’t kiss hello and please don’t touch.” Laing writes of Warhol’s use of machines to distance himself from too much intimate contact — stick a tape recorder or a camera in between you and the person you’re interacting with, and it serves as a kind of filter:

Collage comes up a lot in the book — gluing broken or different things together — and it turns out that some of Henry Darger’s process wasn’t all that different from Warhol’s:

[Darger] started with found images, sometimes backing them on card or doctoring them in subtle ways, especially by painting over them, adding hats or costumes, or simply piercing the eyes. Next, he progressed to collages, cutting images out of newspapers and magazines and pasting them into increasingly complex composites. The problem with this technique was that each component image could only be used once, meaning that he had to find more and more raw materials, either at the hospital or by going through the trash. It was wasteful of resources, and also frustrating, having to surrender a favoured image, to commit to just one picture, just one scenario.

This is where tracing came in. With tracing, he could liberate a figure or object from its past context and reuse it dozens if not hundreds of time, inserting it by way of carbon paper into a diversity of scenes. I t was economical, a thrifty process, and it also let him magically posess the image in a way that scissors didn’t, transferring it first on to tracing paper and then again through the blue sheets of carbon into the painting proper. One of his favourites was a doleful little girl holding a bucket, one finger in her mouth. Once you’ve spotted her, she crops up over and again…

I knew nothing at all about David Wojnarowicz when I first read the book. His story, and the story of how AIDS basically decimated a whole NYC subculture in the 80s and 90s, was the one I found most moving in the book. (Laing quotes a lot from his memoir, Close To The Knives, and later wrote a very moving piece about his work in Funny Weather, also putting his face on the cover.)

So, other than art, how does one combat loneliness? What types of connection should we look for? In his great review, Dwight Garner quoted Laing on checking her Twitter feed (she quit Twitter a few years ago, but her Instagram is lovely):

“It was the first thing I looked at and the last, this descending scroll from mostly strangers, institutions, friends, this ephemeral community in which I was a disembodied and inconstant presence. Picking through the litany, the domestic and the civic: lens solution, book cover, news of a death, protest picture, art opening, joke about Derrida, refugees in the forests of Macedonia, hashtag shame, hashtag lazy, climate change, lost scarf, joke about Daleks: a stream of information, sentiment and opinion that some days, most days maybe, received more attention than anything actual in my life.”

Sometimes the data stream makes her feel joyous. “At other times, though, the whole thing seemed insane, a trading-off of time against nothing tangible at all: a yellow star, a magic bean, a simulacrum of intimacy.” Civic as well as personal space has been circumscribed. Ms. Laing describes Manhattan cafes “populated almost exclusively by people gazing into the glowing clamshells of their laptops.”

It’s interesting, looking back at my notes, the few things that I took here and there for Keep Going. For example, this quote about walking from Greta Garbo, taken out of its rather dark context (Garbo was stalked and photographed by a paparazzo):

“I would rather be outside walking that to sit inside a theater and watch a picture moving. Walking is my greatest pleasure.” And again: “Often I just go where the man in front of me is going. I couldn’t survive here if I didn’t walk. I couldn’t be 24 hours in this apartment. I get out and look at the human beings.”

Laing herself sums it up: “What matters is kindness; what matters is solidarity. What matters is staying alert, staying open…”

There’s so much good stuff in the book, I can’t begin to quote it all, or explain how it all weaves together. Here are my little brick notes I took while reading:

* * *

Every Saturday I put one of my favorite books on the Bookshelf. To see more of my favorite books, check out my reading years.

Finding nourishment vs. identifying poison

Wednesday, May 20, 2020

“We need to know what’s going on,” writes Olivia Laing in her new collection of essays, Strange Weather: Art in an Emergency, “but how much detail is useful, and what do you do once you’ve got it?”

To deal with this question, Laing brings up Eve Sedgwick’s idea of “paranoid” reading vs. “reparative“ reading.

“Anyone who’s spent time on the internet in the past few years will recognise how it feels to be caught up in paranoid reading,” Laing writes. The paranoid reader is all about “gathering information,” addicted to the idea that the “next click, the next link” that will bring clarity. But clarity never comes, because you can never, ever know enough to avoid danger and disaster.

Though paranoid readings can be enlightening and grimly revelatory, they also have a tendency to loop towards dead ends, tautology, recursion, to provide comprehensive evidence for hopelessness and dread, to prove what we already feared we knew. While helpful at explaining the state we’re in, they’re not so useful at envisaging ways out.

An “altogether different approach” is “reparative” reading, reading that “isn’t so much concerned with avoiding danger as with creativity and survival.”

A useful analogy for what [Sedgwick] calls ‘reparative reading’ is to be fundamentally more invested in finding nourishment than identifying poison. This doesn’t mean being naive or undeceived, unaware of crisis or undamaged by oppression. What it does mean is being driven to find or invent something new and sustaining out of inimical environments.

I would like to adopt that line as a mission statement: “To be fundamentally more invested in finding nourishment rather than identify poison.”

Because you can identify all the poison you want, but if you don’t find nourishment, you’ll starve to death.

Later in the book’s introduction, Laing says, “I’m going out as a scout, hunting for resources and ideas that might be liberating or sustaining now, and in the future.”

Me too.