In which I’m just me and I trust that’s enough
I’m back! I’m going to stop broadcasting to you when I’ll be here in your inbox next—that sort of accountability works for some people, and I do want it to work for me as time goes on. But I’m not there right now, and that’s okay.
I suspect that as I move towards writing when I want to, I’ll actually write more consistently: more ease, counter to so much of the productivity advice and academic acculturation, seems to mean more motion. And motion, not towards a target goal, but in the compass direction that feels right (informed by the rigor and analysis now baked into my constitution through training), is what ends up leading me towards joy. And joy brings abundance of energy and ideas—jogging in its direction, now running, now pausing to fully rest.
The Logic of Wants
I’m driven substantially by anxiety and resistance to feeling, not my wants. This manifests in my writing and creative Practice. Even though I am intellectually beyond these patterns and recognize their faults, I won’t call this silly, because that’s an unhelpful diminution of how visceral an emotional hold it has on me at present.
This manifests in a frequent feeling-thought “if I’m not doing the Thing, that must mean I don’t want to.” And if I don’t want to, then I must not really care, and if I don’t care about what I say I care about, what sort of person am I, anyway? … It’s not just in-the-world analytics that can endanger a creative practice and community engagement: these internal ones have knocked me out more than once.
But my brain over-trained in logic can help me here, too. The contrapositive of this thought is “If I want to do it, I do it.” And this just isn’t true right now. I’ve noticed I mostly find excuses not to do what some part of me really wants to do, actually. So rather than surrender to the analysis paralysis of figuring out what I want from what I do and don’t, I think I’ll work to strengthen my trust in this conditional instead. When I feel like doing the Thing, I’ll let myself.
What’s True Somewhere is True Everywhere (in my life)
The above universalizing tendency has been used to elide all sorts of lived experiences—but I can recognize its contingent truth in my own life. I over-analyze and I’m a perfectionist. When I play polyphonic music on the piano, my fingers stay glued to the current chord, increasingly out of sync with the score, until I’ve figured out how to land the next chord perfectly. When I decide on a new habit—and it is a head-centered decision process—I make a whole big system for it, then don’t do it.
By this same principle, what I feel motion and growth in in one area of my life spreads to other areas—without me explicitly transferring it. When I am more present with my family, I am more present alone with myself. When I love myself more fully, I love others more and judge less the parts of them that resemble my as-yet-less-loved parts.
How That Manifests Here
I thought I needed “solid work” to show before writing to you. (My implicit definition of “solid,” by the way, is conditioned and ridiculous, in the sense that I laugh knowingly at it when I have the presence of mind to do so).
So I thought—writing a missive isn’t enough. It needs links. Poignant pictures. It’s a curation of and report on the “real” work I put out elsewhere. Really that’s a lack of trust both in me and in you, reader. Requiring abundance to assure value means I don’t think the stuff that makes up my work is valuable on its own.
My Research on Letters: Why I Should Know Better
I should know better from my PhD research, actually. The letters between Early Modern scientists that I study are, yes, full of references to their other works, but they stand on their own, too. When I read them I get lost in the connectedness that shines in them. Sometimes I follow up on the references, but they’re for later, further and truly optional reading. Earlier in my Latin studies, I read Cicero’s and Seneca’s letters with fascination, in the latter case barely aware that Seneca had other rich works to offer me.
The authors I sit with in my research have voluminous output in multiple genres, often even multiple languages. Their Collected Works span dozens of volumes—not exaggerating. It’s impossible to read all of them in a lifetime and I’m agnostic about the role “distant reading”—reading with the help of algorithms—will play in my scholarship. So I need through lines and guides that I stop thinking of as shortcuts.
I find that through-line in the letters (the ones actually sent, more than the artificial ones with posterity in mind). In chronological order, they are the author themself guiding me through their works. They help me understand not just how the body of work I get in final form evolved (Latin evolvere: to unroll), but what each work meant to the author at time of writing, or twenty years later, if I’m lucky. They are not optional appendices, but Latin addenda — “things that must be added.”
I don’t take them as the definitive guide to their works, of course. They’re one take among many possible ones from both the author in a different state of mind and each of their readers. But the intentionality and feeling of these letters which makes them subjective is exactly what makes them so meaningful. Instead of doing random walks through these Collected Works, maybe missing what will most resonate with me or the communities I seek conversation with, I have signposts, explanatory plaques, and sometimes just an impetus to hurry up along a path I’m already on to what’s most worth seeing in the opinion of its shaper.
So…
I have some things I love next up to show you, but I’m gonna end here this time on purpose. There’s so much I want to share with you, and I trust that we’ll be here together long enough to engage over lots of it.
I hope something in this picture-less, link-less letter spoke to you…
… And if it did, let me know! I’m on Twitter as @jacobusbanks and active in the comments section on these posts. Or just reply to this email.
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