I set a timer for 30 minutes, put my phone in the other room, and wrote.
I haven’t been writing lately. And it isn’t because I don’t have anything to write about because I do. Boy, do I.
So I flip my notebook open: my little treasure trove of nubby thoughts. Not seeds as they are so often called. Nubs. Little knots that have grown from a thought and I had to capture before, you know…fleeting. If you’re picturing a potato that is covered in the little sprouted growths that my grandma, and then my mom, and now I call “eyes,” then you’re picking up what I’m putting down (yes, my head is the potato and those growths that begin if the potato sits too long are my thoughts).
Okay, so the first nub says, “NEW ENLIGHTENMENT! Tie to intuition that’s everywhere! A desire to slowwwww down. No more self-help.”
I thought that if we believe in history, then we know that the Enlightenment gave just enough people the creeps that they jumped on the pendulum and swung hard in the other direction. All that production. All that work. All that uniform thought. All those hierarchies and categories and empiricism. Woof.
So I guess I was thinking about how if we’re in the fourth Enlightenment or whatever, then a Romantic period is close behind or maybe running side-by-side. In the last few years, I’ve noticed that when people learn something new they will sometimes say, “I know it seems counterintuitive, but…” and then they’ll explain their idea. But what if it is just undoing all those things from the Enlightenment that have built the structures in our brains? What if counterintuitive just means counter to how we’ve been taught to think, not counter to our actual intuition? And when AI really makes me worry about standardization of thought, I desire a Romantic Period to really just blow it all up (but not really because even though I’m angry AF about a lot of things, I’m a pacificist). I get why the Romantics just wanted to sit in nature and write poetry as the antidote to industrialization.
Rick Rubin wrote this book about being creative called The Creative Act. It is about what it takes to do your best work. I was reading it while taking a break from reading for grad school, so I ate it up because my brain was craving big, nebulous, paradoxical ideas for me to navel gaze about. And by navel gaze, I mean think about while standing in grocery store lines resisting the urge to look at my phone or on walks from my classroom to my car while looking at this old eucalyptus tree that I’m in love with, or in between thinking about meeting agendas and laundry and that corner in my kitchen floor that really needs to be cleaned or what I wanted to eat. Rubin calls for people to resist the pressures of society to conform and to relax back into ourselves to be able to make something creative. Rick Rubin wasn’t the only one preaching from the intuition soap box. I read a book called Listening in the Dark by Amber Tamblyn. It is a collection of essays from women who have survived the worst of it by following their intuition, often leading them away from who and what society wanted them to be. Maybe, when women were killed for hearing the voice of God, it was just their own, powerful voice. Perhaps, their intuition?
And then I was talking to a friend about Fantasy Football and I told him I wasn’t going to be playing this year because I don’t have time to write and writing brings me more satisfaction than most Sundays during football season when I’m playing Fantasy Football. We were talking about QB ratings and I said a QB rating has to be taken into consideration with the offensive line because context creates meaning. He agreed, and then he told me that so many predictions about who is going to be the next great quarterback are wrong because we think the data can predict who will be great, but it really all comes down to “game-time instincts.” And I asked, “You mean, like, intuition?”
Was that sexist? Is that sexist? That trusting your gut if you’re a man is so often called “instincts,” but “intuition” is lady stuff...
In August, I was at Outsidelands, not on drugs. I have to say that before I say what's next because I know I can kind of sound like I am on drugs when I’m talking to people because I’m not very good at small talk. An acquaintance just found out that I am an English teacher and was telling me that he thinks more men need to read fiction because it “creates empathy.” I smiled and said “That’s nice,” but I wondered to myself (and was sure to keep it in my head) “If you need a book to teach you empathy, did you ever really have the capacity for it in the first place?” He kept talking and I kept my listening face and he told me that so many men read non-fiction, and...I interrupted him. So many people read non-fiction because we feel the pressure to always be optimizing. We want to know more to win more arguments, and be made smarter by people who study in places that we think are “smart,” and we hope it can help us do our jobs better, making us more money or helping us gain more clout. We assume that non-fiction can make us better people faster than fiction can. Non-fiction can operate in our lives like a self-help book and we, as Americans, love that shit. I also told him that fiction requires us to slow down and reread and process and it might not have much utility to us in the day-to-day besides pulling the shades open to the window to our understanding, letting in a little bit more light.
So, the thirty-minute timer I set is about to go off (I know because I've gotten up twice to look), and I’m thinking about how maybe I’m wrong and fiction does teach us empathy, but in a counterintuitive way. We're not just reading to learn about people who are demographically different than us. It's more than that. When we read the good shit, it should slow us down, make us pause, because we’re not only learning about the characters; we’re also learning how someone tells a story, what someone sees as important, and feeling the rhythm of their sentences, long, lingering, and melodic or manic, staccato, and urgent. Digging into the nuance of the word, we do so many things when we empathize with people: we learn how to listen, pay attention, and most likely have our way of thinking and communicating challenged. And maybe we avoid reading fiction because what fiction really calls us to do is slow down and learn about and be attentive to ourselves and that shit can be scary.
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