The Pointless Investigations
This is what you get when you send me off for a week to a cottage in the woods.
In 2011, roughly a year after I founded and began editing The Stone at The New York Times, in partnership with the philosopher Simon Critchley, I received a submission from a young philosopher named Justin E. H. Smith. It was called (at least in its final published form) The Flight of Curiosity. The piece was a smart and elegantly written consideration of the diminished role of curiosity in professional philosophy. I consider The Flight to be one of the foundational essays in The Stone, not only because it came early in the arc of the project, but because it articulated something about what we were doing in running a philosophy series at the world’s pre-eminent newspaper. (Because, what was I thinking? Clearly, this will never work.) It taught me something about the nature of our thinking, not just as “philosophers” but as living creatures, and our resulting investigations into the world. Since then, Justin, who now goes by Justin Smith-Ruiu, has written several excellent books and has built a formidable literary home on Substack at The Hinternet,
If you know me, you know I’m a title guy. Titles, captions, subheds, blurbs, I like them. I like writing them. Perhaps because of my immersion in poetry and my being raised up since I was a baby boy on pop music, the pithy, kind of funny yet meaningful title usually comes naturally to me (I also steal shamelessly from pop music, movies and literature, as well as from the authors of the pieces themselves, who have usually embedded a great title somewhere in the piece without knowing it). I think I wrote this one but I can’t be entirely sure. I wrote Justin to ask if he recalled whether he or I wrote the headline. He replied that my recollection of writing the title was “plausible” but that “it does sound like a phrase I would use, so I'm inclined to say it was me.”
So much for determining absolute certainty, then.
Whatever the case, I’m guessing that, in considering our options, I at some point considered The Death of Curiosity and that I worried it was too, you know, sad. Or perhaps it was “The Death of …” framing being overused, used to death, so to speak. I’d learned since our very first Stone essay in 2010 (Simon Critchley’s truly foundational What Is a Philosopher?) that while many readers had a genuine interest in philosophy that others tended to avoid anything that even suggested it (or maybe they were just avoiding philosophers, as you might at a party) and I didn’t see the point in giving them another reason to bypass this terrific piece by announcing the death of something they may not have cared about in the first place. Flight, though — that had some mystery, some sense of movement, or daring or escape. I liked the idea of announcing the flight of curiosity — look, it’s running away! — while at the same time perhaps stirring some new curiosity in readers about what it meant exactly.
But I digress (why else would I be writing on Substack, without a goddam editor?). One of the remarkable things about my reading of this essay is that a single paragraph became etched in my memory the first time I read it and never left, and the reason I’m even bringing this up now is that it came to me again and again as I spent hours walking and thinking and writing this week, trying to gain some better sense of the nature of my own work, and my own seemingly scattered responses to being in the world (in publishing they call this “writing a book.”). It is really the second paragraph of the two I am reproducing here that I most often recall but I include both now for context. After several paragraphs (an impatient newspaper editor, not me, might call it a “leisurely” opening) spent critically laying out the challenges faced by academic philosophy and the lament that the discipline “may have lost something that once helped to fuel it: a curiosity about the world in all its detail,” Justin wrote:
Consider Kenelm Digby’s 1658 account of the weapon salve, or the treatment of wounds at a distance by manipulation of the weapon that caused them. Digby in fact offered a fascinating, sophisticated application of early modern corpuscularianism, yet many philosophers today suppose that to take an interest in a false theory from the past such as this one, to research it and to write about it, implies a rejection of the idea of truth itself. I myself was once dismissed as a “postmodernist” by a referee for a journal to which I submitted an article on the weapon salve.
There is no basis for such an accusation. For among the great many truths in the world is this one: a man named Digby once believed something false. To take an interest in that false belief is not to reject the truth, but only to wish to fill out our picture of the truth with as much detail as possible, and not because of some aesthetic inclination to the baroque, but rather because false theories are an important part of the puzzle that we as philosophers should be trying to complete: that of determining the range of ways people conceptualize the world around them.
Dang, that is so good. That last paragraph rung my head like a bell and also did something much more important. It gave me an understanding (one that I often lost sight of in the intervening years) that my own disparate wanderings — intellectual, aesthetic, emotional, spiritual — were, you know, OK, that my sometimes frustrating inconstancy didn’t constitute my failure as a thinking, acting human being, and might even amount to something. And if it didn’t amount to something then, it might be useful along the way for someone else, or it it might clear the way for some body of knowledge or useful discovery that I wasn’t able to see through the fog of my own ambitions. Even today, it’s made me feel OK about the fact that I didn’t intend to write about any of this when I woke up, or gather the vaguely related musings you will soon come upon (if you don’t leave). I just followed my curiosity, and the day’s interest.
All this has been my own leisurely introduction to some thoughts I’ll share from my wanderings this week. I do have three or four promising essay-lets in the works but they are being stubborn about coming together, and so I offer this “collection of fragments,” in the spirit of Pascal’s Pensées, if you can tolerate the comparison (I’m terrible at math, he wasn’t) — or maybe Cortazar’s Hopscotch or Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, two maddeningly incoherent books that I can’t stop picking up and putting down — sorting out some of the ingredients for the winter stew, as it were, before it is fully cooked. I do this, not in hubris, but with the vague hope that perhaps, like poor Digby, there might be a sort of corpuscularianism in my future.
I. Bad advice
Sometimes people ask me for advice. This is what happens when you are old and you haven't yet gone up in flames. I tend not to give it.
My entire life, aside from a few impulses and persistent beliefs to which I have remained faithful, has unfolded like an accident, but an overwhelmingly happy one. For instance, I am “by nature” a musician and a poet. I wanted to be a novelist, and failed. I became an editor by accident (and by the patience, good grace and generosity of some of my journalistic mentors). To some, I’m a philosopher. That was an accident, too. Mainly because “real philosophers” were kind to me. The phrase that suggests itself here, The Accidental Philosopher, was nearly the title of this entire project (and I’m claiming it here for later use, if not legally then for the record). Had I planned to become either of these things I’m certain I would have failed and become something else entirely. So what could I possibly tell an eager aspirant that wouldn’t profoundly upset their parents?
I maintain this healthy skepticism for advice, for the posturing of authority and for airs of certainty, because I think they counter free flourishing and true productivity, which are not predictable or linear in most cases. Socrates knew this and that is why his position of knowing that he does not know is the most repeated one in all his purported works.
Certainty, arriving at an answer, or the feeling that you have, can satisfy, but it can also deaden. You have reached a finish line, the end of a game. It extinguishes the search. You now may rest. Or record and classify. Like planning, planting and cultivating a garden of carefully selected plants that no longer possess the unpredictable aspects and raw appeal and allure of the wild and unknown. If I could take a walk in the woods or take a walk through a garden, I would nine times out of ten choose the woods for what that unknown landscape may bring. Though, admittedly, if the woods are too dark or tangled, I’ll be afraid. I will not go. And sometimes when I am cold or tired or depressed, I'd just like to see something pretty, maybe sit on a bench, and a garden is nice.
II. Probably not for sale
I'd like to write a book about creativity and consciousness that doesn't kill the organic nature of those things by pretending to have apprehended them. A book that surrenders to the fact that the elusiveness of artistic creation and mental activity is part of its allure. A book that encourages finding a sort of peace in lostness. The book I’m imagining (or maybe writing) would just explore it. Not make a promise to the consumer, no “takeaway” or practical advice given, no argument about something to be accepted and acted upon. No opinion. A book that would just say honestly, This is who I am and this is what I have observed this in the course of my investigations. You could take it or leave it.
III. I can see why this usually takes two people
How is it we are so driven by curiosity? We act on our desire to know even though we understand that full knowledge is a chimera, as Flaubert put it in pursuing the writing of Madame Bovary (documented in the delightful and useful book Daily Rituals, by another Substacker, Mason Currey). Our knowing is compromised by the fact that we can not achieve full knowledge. It is a process with no end. Scientific naming, defining, classification and categorization — essential to the collection of the butterfly or gem or insect — all but signal the death of the living. A job of sorting and arranging once the productive growth has ended. The editor’s job. What is ideal or healthy for the author or the artist is acting on the curiosity, but organizing and defining their findings for human consumption later, after the fact. I can see why this usually takes two people. A writer and an editor. At least.
IV. Showtunes
I always hated musicals. Still do. I thought it was so ridiculous to see someone in the middle of speech break out into song. But that is often what poetry or philosophy are. Songs in response to something observed or experienced in the world. Seeing it this way, I have begun to better understand the impulse to break into song. I suppose that’s how we got Ode to a Nightingale. Keats saying, in effect, “I just can’t keep my adoration and melancholy in the presence of this bird to myself anymore.” I still hate musicals. Not on principle. I understand the impulse. It's that I just don't like those songs.
V. Author of self
Writing can offer a way to the creation of a new or renewed self, to deliver the author into a new existence. No one but the author himself would understand this idea, or be able to confirm its plausibility. You don’t know how you will feel taking a walk until you actually take the walk. You can then try to recreate it in words. But it won’t be the same.
VI. Yo, is this idea fire? Or am I overthinking It?
In our consciousness, we produce an internal reality, the world as experienced by the author or by the artist or by the human. Outside is the external world (duh). The physical world. In between the two is a point of contact and mediation. This point of contact produces an experience in the author's consciousness. And the author's task is describing or otherwise conveying what that experience is like. Attempting to communicate in most cases through art. Art is the expression or result of that mediation between the internal world and the external world. The physical and the metaphysical. The practice of art is the negotiation of that experience, of perceiving and understanding the actual world, and running it through the process of internal interpretation or translation, bringing the inside out. A response to that world.
But what is the reason for it? Why write or make art? A simple analogy would be the passing on of fire from one person to the next (one acted out in every Olympic opening ceremony), the fire being the essence of human experience.
The point of the artist in this role is to preserve the living-ness of the experience. The kinetic or organic or sensory qualities of those experiences. Of consciousness. Of being alive. The artist might be called the flame keeper, whose job is to not let the sacred flame go out. Keepers of the flame are keepers of the divine and spiritual — if you care to use that language, and if not, call it something simpler, reality or life — whose responsibility, as Richard Hugo says, is making certain it goes on.
This is the outcome of my pointless investigations.
VII. Showtime (a MetaSubstack)
At the risk of contributing to the recent phenomenon of MetaSubstacking, writing a Substack post about your Substack, I consider the following:
The problem of writing for the public, in public (i.e. Substack).
Some writers are performers. They are completely confident with the megaphone, and write with unquestioning swagger, certain that the audience is eager to hear every word they have to offer. But writing as a form leaves room for other creatures, as well, even very timid or hesitant or reticent ones, those who are shy, like to hide, but are compelled to somehow reach the public. To announce their presence. To be seen, if only in shadow. They are enigmatic, cryptic, dodgy or elliptical. They need to be drawn out through the active conversations — and by the cover — that art can provide.
These writers are unsure of themselves, unlike the megaphone holders. They don’t quite yet know what it is they think or feel. Yet in the best cases, the reader receives from these more retiring personalities a vulnerability and humanness that the very confident and assured writer cannot provide for them. Boastfulness repels me (it attracts others). Even someone who possesses great gifts of intellect and perception will turn sour for me if I sense in them an overconfidence, or a self regard that is so high that it does not leave any room to consider the possibility of frailty or error.
In formats like this one, at least from an aesthetic or creative point of view, there is a built-in limitation — a close identification of the author as a person with the text he or she produces. For instance, I am talking to you here. I’m a public person engaged in speech. And in some sense, you know me. I’m not just creating content here. If I do or say something errant or heinous, I will face a consequence. I’m conveying a sense, quite carefully and consciously of who I am. I am aiming at the very least to not offend. I am writing within these parameters. But am I then fully writing?
We read this writing — by me or any other author in similar connected social venues — as speech of an individual, a person with a history and a personality and a role in society, who is accountable for that speech. This will compel the author to never write anything in this context that might cause her harm, or harm to others, or that might damage her reputation or her ability to live untarnished in the world.
This is "social media" literature, in which the separation between the writer and the writing does not exist. This does not leave room for the some of the basic conditions conducive to the flourishing of imaginative art — self-transcendence or the release of the self, the removal of ego and the strictures of one's social responsibilities and upbringing in the act of writing.
I've found Substack to be generally wonderful, and I don’t expect it to be some literary paradise in which all things are granted to the aspirant, but the performative aspect of it makes it seem less than ideal for certain authors who must experiment with various voices, selves and the landscapes of the imagination. I’m sure those things can be done here, but the persistent presence of the author as a person would be a constant reminder that this is a performance (as though we are being invited to a theater (to watch a a play while sitting next to the playwright), and knowing that something at least partly theatrical will take place.
So is this real?
Music I listened to while writing this:
John Cage: The Works for Violin, Vol. 6 & the String Quartets, Vol. 4
Nathan Davis: Neutral Buoyant
Ovlov: Buds
Substacks mentioned in this article:
I have no idea why we are curious but it’s intensely pleasurable to be curious about a thing and have your curiosity satisfied (sometimes only for a moment) and the curiosity that sometimes follows about a new thing is intensely pleasurable as well. It is among the most pleasurable things I experience in life, and I suspect most people aren’t so different when it comes to that. There’s also a pain that comes with it. They mix in the oddest way, like scratching an itch where the preceding discomfort is somehow connected to the subsequent enjoyment.
This pursuit of knowledge is supposed to be good but it can also get a bit out of control, like any other thing. The internet doesn’t help with that.