And so Jim Jonesy!

As Trump flames out, his disordered thought, paranoia, racism, and authoritarianism are converging.

He won’t be president on January 20th because Black citizens–13% of America’s population–voting in Milwaukee, Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Detroit–said NO to him. NO.

This is intolerable to Trump, that Blacks should have such power over his fate–and so naturally he is trying to get all those voters and their ballots cancelled, with only the White voters counting.

So racist. So anti-American. One man or woman, one vote. One man or woman of color, one vote. George Wallace and Bull Connor had nothing on Trump. He’s literally targeting Black majority communities across the United States–and the liberal Asians, Hispanics, and Whites who live in those cities with them–looking to essentially cancel a key human right of their citizenship: their right to vote, and to have that vote counted.

Mitt Romney said this yesterday: “The president has now resorted to overt pressure on state and local officials to subvert the will of the people and overturn the election. It is difficult to imagine a worse, more undemocratic action by a sitting American president.”

What is meditation? (five basic observations)

First, we might say that meditation is a way to exercise the prefrontal cortex (your attention/discipline muscle) via calm focus and non-reactive observing.

In meditation, you’re delaying gratification & “doing the harder thing,” as per the neuroendocrinologist Robert Sapolsky, not the easier, perhaps noticing that everything is burning, flowing, and changing–inside and out–and you’re being quiet and still in response. In meditation, you don’t trigger easily.

It’s akin to being a radio: you’re receptive to the flow of things through and around you, noticing the signal amplitudes that arrive to your attention. (“Oh, man, that channel is coming in really strong!”)

In film, I think of Rossellini’s Stromboli (1950) and Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966). In Stromboli, a woman (actress Ingrid Bergman), after a great inner struggle, arrives at peace with living on an island that has an active volcano; in Persona, a woman (actress Liv Ullmann) goes silent in response to trauma and absurdity.

Yes, I get it that both of these films are problematic as rationales for meditation, and even raise problematic issues surrounding the value of meditation in the first place. But in terms of describing what one is doing in meditation, as opposed to whether it should be practiced in the first place, one is dampening reactivity with an even temperament, going from a soundtrack of desire to a meta-soundtrack of non-reactivity. That is, one is fixing unconditioned awareness on the present, w/out tanha—Pāli for thirst—& you don’t grasp or push away, but instead eat the dragon heat of tapas (a Vedic term for “inner heat”), staying put on your cushion or yoga mat.

So in meditation, it’s easy come, easy go–which is much easier said than practiced. The poet John Ashbery puts it this way: “The seasons are no longer what they once were, / But it is the nature of things to be seen only once / As they happen along.”

Second, there are two basic types of meditation: one is tratak, or single focus (single point) meditation. This is where you place your attention on one thing, perhaps a candle flame, and you are in no hurry, still and quiet in the presence of it. You stay with it; you don’t attend to anything else. This of course strongly works the pre-frontal cortex, one’s attention/discipline “muscle.” Second, there is vipassana.

The attention/discipline “muscle” is strongly worked in vipassana as well, but in vipassana, the attention alights on ever-changing particulars, and they are observed closely. That is, there is the breaking down of essence and emergence by calmly noticing that things also consist of parts that are constantly changing. It can be thought of as a form of foreground-background/aspect seeing, as in the famous face-vase image in introductory psychology books. In vipassana, one drops the foreground faces, as it were, and notices their interconnection and reliance on background conditions, which can be observed to constantly change.

So you are in no hurry, observing these underlying, changing conditions without preference, and in perfect stillness and silence. In vipassana, you notice that everything is burning and nothing is simple (that is, all things consist of parts)—and therefore, that nothing is personal. Put another way, because things consist of shifting parts in causal relation, it’s hard to become bitter toward people or yourself. It’s akin to raging at the components of weather that have come together to make wind. The wind is blowing in response to immediate, impersonal conditions, not because it is out to get you, personally.

Third, in meditation one is, as Robert Wright puts it, “taking the red pill.” That is, you are noticing how your wet, mammalian brain, built by evolution, interacts with the environmental matrix. For example, you might notice acutely that every pleasant dopamine hit fades, and the calm poetry of being here now, on your meditation cushion, fades, and perhaps becomes boring, tempting you elsewhere: to spells and manias for sex, food, service (ends), & status.

In meditation, what you are doing is hacking the matrix by breathing evenly, noting how your brain is churning in response to stimuli, even as you are not reacting to those churns, having some emotional distance from them, merely observing them, like a lion on a hill.

You might thus ask, “To what end am I being hijacked/tempted to serve & what modules/networks in my brain are being activated in the service?”—then you might, in the words of the poet Wallace Stevens in his poem, “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” “let be be finale of seem” (that is, let be be an end in itself; let the appearance of now be the epiphany of being, not the mere appearance of something on its way to something else deeper and more important). Wallace Stevens’s poem, “Of Mere Being” (1967) can be helpful here:

The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze decor,

A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

Fourth, meditation is a trick for dropping desire and aversion so that you can see inside/outside as one. That is, you don’t let anything inward or outside bother you; you notice the blood flowing in your veins and arteries and the streams of life flowing everywhere outside of you. It’s all one system; one flow.

Reduced to four words, meditation is this: one thing, no reaction.

The “no reaction” helps you see that everything is one thing. In literature, one can think of Emerson’s famous “Eyeball” and of T. S. Eliot’s end point or “still point of the turning world.” By embracing no reaction, you can choose love awareness and see love as connection & peace, with no need to grasp and hold.

Another poet we might think of here is Allen Ginsberg: “It’s never too late to do [or to be or buy] nothing at all!” And with each day, we might say with the French poet and critic Apollinaire, “Here’s the day’s poetry!”

It’s akin to Jacques Derrida’s reflections on l’avenir, the time to come; i.e. being open, flexible, & accepting of the onrush of new things, enacting LSD-style hospitality, but via a method less freighted with recreational drug usage to arrive at the effect: mere meditation itself.

Fifth, in relation to poetry, literature, and language, meditation can be thought of as the practice of bringing down the energy on one’s nouns and adjectives. In other words, it teaches us to think of things as a happening, noticing that things (nouns) are really events in relation (the physicist Carlo Rovelli)—and that nouns often bear adjectives, which entail emotions and models that drive our judgments. In meditation we might question, for example, lyrics like these from the Schoolhouse Rock children’s song on adjectives: “It was a hairy bear! / It was a scary bear!” What happens to our charged, alarmed perceptions when we drop the hairy and scary–and perhaps even let the designation bear itself drop away? Wallace Stevens’s poem, “The Plain Sense of Things,” captures this intuition that we should interrogate our habitual deployments of language, such as judgmental adjectives:

After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir [French for knowledge].

It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.

The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.

Yet the absence of the imagination had
Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence

Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as a necessity requires.

In other words, Wallace Stevens agrees that language and imagination are inescapable. If you seem to strip them away, they’re still there, even if sublimated (“the absence of the imagination had / Itself to be imagined”). Mental life always accompanies our bodily and environmental life. No need to run from that. But Stevens, in this poem, also shows an interest in at least sometimes attempting to subtract imagination, judgment, naming (nouns), and adjectives as much as possible from the poet’s fictions & seeing what’s left. Doing so is akin to opening up to a Freudian return of the repressed. Part of the work of meditation is a willingness to look the repressed in the eye, allowing it to appear from beneath the overlay of imagination, language, and reactive emotions.

What about meditation’s relation to the environment?

Two points here.

At one level, meditation in relation to the environment is noticing that, when actually observed moment by moment, the self is not different in nature from the dynamic environment. Along with all other things, the self too is a flux, elusive, not really graspable, like a phantom or blue pipe smoke. Here’s the historian and philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) on the illusion that one possesses a stable, permanent self:

There are some philosophers who imagine we are every moment intimately conscious of what we call our self….For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep, so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist…I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement (T 1.6.4, 1–4; SBN 251–53).

Scholars have puzzled over how Hume arrived at such an explicitly Buddhist position on the self, and have generally concluded that he had access to Buddhist texts in translation, but of interest here is that meditation–most specifically, vipassana meditation–is the practice of observing that all things consist of parts–including the self, which Hume expresses admirably here, independent of how he arrived at the insight.

At another level, meditation in relation to the environment is samadhi (a consciousness of the oneness and interconnection of all things), as when the astronaut Edgar Mitchell described his experience in 1971 of being in space:

I had completed my major task for going to the moon and was on my way home and was observing the heavens and the earth from this distance, observing the passing of the heavens. As we were rotated, I saw the earth, the sun, the moon, and a 360 degree panorama of the heavens [—the stars of which are ten times brighter than when they are seen from Earth]. The magnificence of all of this was this trigger in my visioning. In the ancient Sanskrit, it’s called Samadhi. It means that you see things with your senses the way they are – you experience them viscerally and internally as a unity and a oneness accompanied by ecstasy.

Here’s The New York Times recounting Mitchell’s experience of samadhi:

[In 1971 Edgar Mitchell] is 40…It is Feb. 9, 1971, and he has just had an epiphany. It happened on the flight back from the moon, where Mitchell and his colleague Alan Shepard had traversed [regions of the moon]…to gather geological samples that, it was hoped, might reveal something of the moon’s inner structure. As the Kitty Hawk command module hurtled homeward, Mitchell watched the earth, moon and sun passing by the window of the rotating capsule in two-minute intervals. Looking out into space, Mitchell later recalled, “I realized that the molecules of my body and the molecules of the spacecraft had been manufactured in an ancient generation of stars.” Mitchell was a naval aviator whose doctoral dissertation, from M.I.T., was on guidance systems in low-thrust interplanetary vehicles. Nothing in his training had equipped him for a sudden discovery of the oneness of all things. “It was a subjective visceral experience accompanied by ecstasy,” he would later tell a yoga magazine.

To conclude, here are two poems that I think bring together the key ideas surrounding meditation that I’ve attempted to outline above. The first is by Mary Tighe (1772-1810)
written at Scarborough in August of 1799:

As musing pensive in my silent home
I hear far off the sullen ocean’s roar,
Where the rude wave just sweeps the level shore,
Or bursts upon the rocks with whitening foam,
I think upon the scenes my life has known;
On days of sorrow, and some hours of joy;
Both which alike time could so soon destroy!
And now they seem a busy dream alone;
While on the earth exists no single trace
Of all that shook my agitated soul,                                                                         As on the beach new waves forever roll
And fill their past forgotten brother’s place:
But I, like the worn sand, exposed remain,
To each new storm which frets the angry main.

And here is Adam Zagajewski’s poem, “The Last Stop,” as translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh. It appeared in the January/February 2011 issue of The Atlantic. After you read the poem, I’ll offer a way to think about it in light of meditation and Wallace Stevens’s poem, “Of Mere Being,” which was presented and discussed earlier in this post.

The tram rumbled past red houses.
The wheels in mining towers whirled
like carousels in fairgrounds.
Roses dimmed by soot grew in the gardens,
wasps raged in pastry shops
above cakes strewn with crumbs.
I was fifteen, the tram moved
quicker between the housing projects,
in the meadows I spotted marsh marigolds.
I thought that at the last stop
the meaning of it all would stand revealed,
but nothing happened, nothing,
the driver ate a roll with cheese,
two old women talked quietly
about prices and diseases.

So I read Zagajewski’s poem in light of “Of Mere Being” in the following manner: it’s in the gleam of Wallace Stevens’s “bronze décor” at “the end of the mind,” with the bird’s “fire-fangled feathers dangling down,” that we meditate–and reach samadhi. In meditation we are not oriented toward some far-off mental space (Zagajewski’s “last stop”). For those paying attention to the present, we are always already at the “palm at the end of the mind.” The kingdom of the bird’s “fire-fangled feathers” is right here, at this unlikely combination of events, so the advice of the meditator is to be with the bird now.

In other words, be here now—as Ram Das famously puts it.

Put yet another way, the “two old women” who “talked quietly / about prices and diseases” are another incarnation, another revelation, of being. They are manifestations of Stevens’s bird and palm at the end of the mind. Yet we are often focused, when not in a meditative state, on a distant end, toward Zagajewski’s “last stop,” where “the meaning of it all would stand revealed.” But now is the current revelation of being, whenever we attend to it in meditation. “Be still and know that I am God” and “the kingdom of heaven is within you” might be the monotheistic versions of this insight. This moment is only mere to those who aren’t paying attention to the strangeness–the wonder and alienness–of existence itself.

Note: I made this figure/ground image on my computer to illustrate aspect seeing to myself, and call it “Marilyn Martian.”

I.

Yeats has a question,

and I just love Barbara Stanwyck, don’t you?

So the first thing I’m getting is this:

White is the color of loose saints’

robes

and of atheism,

and blue-white the color of snow

in shadow.

So things are getting warmer.

II.

BS’s derriere bulges beneath a scarlet skirt,

and there is also a four inch wide

ribbon

around her very tiny waist, which is also white

and wrong

–so yes

this may be a hint

to riddles of evolution, Rev. 17:3

and the election’s outcome.

For it is a dragon that BS rides.

No Statue of Liberty cometh as she.

And in answer to your question, Mr. Yeats,

Donald Trump.

III.

It all started with a soft mat of cells.

They grew more numerous at a muddy bottom.

They bubbled upward to the white sun,

bleeding rank gasses, and here we are breathing them.

Again.

By such arrive the secrets. Of dearth. Of light.

So 1933.

IV.

In surety–as in #4surely–the Joker wears the

thorned corona,

and those mailed-

in ballots are to be watched.

The white saints are preying upon them

with great conviction.

Their importance seems to be rising

up up up

as in a dust devil of def; as in a file beginning with D

–so yes, Mr. Yeats, I am a-frayed. Everywhere his cult responds

to a trumpet

which I do not understand

and they alone can hear.

V.

Barbara,

I think he has risen! Can you see that he has risen?

I believe he has risen, too, but I don’t know

whether he has risen enough!

I know you want this, Barb. Ever since Roosevelt, you’ve

been waiting

for this hour. Who’s stuck

with the card of the drowned Phoenician, tell me!

You know, no?

No.

Well, Yeats is at the Ouija Board.

And?

He’s double-checking now.

He says?

Right again.

Which means?

Down again.

_____

It’s their morning walk; one shall be taken.

He’s masked, she’s not. They match

in sweaters. He is black, but time

has made him blue and atheist.

She is bleach white, a poodle.

Reaching the porch he sits; into his lap

she goes. He is her only friend. Cruel

Balaam cared not for his ass, which bore him.

Not so this man, this dog, teeth bearing.

She pours forth a fondue of speech,

tongue writhing like gum, but to a gentle end.

She shares as one carried and as caring.

“I nightmared of Noah’s ark last night;

I was on it, you were not.”

It was in youth that he sought God, but is now

with this life, this dog. Interpreting, he says, “I

was there. The ark was me.” This is why,

of heaven or of hell, of neither

could I believe or bear, without you.

_____

I.

The leaf doesn’t fall far from the tree,

and we are all leaves on the same tree,

and will take our leave from here.

II.

The yellow leaf signals fall, the

green leaf, pride before the fall.

The bud is born to fall.

Death unites us all.

III.

Better be the tree. Call your tree

self the true self. Don’t be

the transient leaf self.

You’ve always been the tree.

IV.

You started as a bud.

Your green is turning yellow.

Now face this wall,

instructs Bodhidharma.

Detach before the fall.

V.

Buzz before you come.

The flower performs oui. 

Toss off your labels

of leaf or tree. Le

mot juste is bee.

VI.

Can leaves resist the wind?

And what about sin?

The apple speaks the non.

Cursed be me that hangs upon this tree.

VII.

And yet I hung for you.

Drank, drooped, descended.

And now have left a seed.

VIII.

Branch now and receive this from me.

Are you the true leaf

written of in sacred leaves?

If not, I should go, and I am.

God gave me a rose,

And God is love.

The rose made me

Sneeze, and I have

Asthma. The rose

Landed

Me in hospital,

Which can’t be right

If God is love

And gave me a rose

And anticipates all.

So God wanted

Me in hospital

To show me love?

I would have

Done it differently.

God hates me

Or does not exist.

I chanced upon a rose.

It meant nothing.

What’s a fanatic, exactly? The well-known Catholic essentialist philosopher Edward Feser, in a recent post at his blog, points to feminist philosophers like Kathleen Stock, Holly Lawford-Smith, and Julie Bindel as “woke fanatics,” but what is a fanatic, exactly, but someone extreme and monomaniacal–and what is prone to be more extreme and monomaniacal than, well, essentialism itself?

In other words, the essentialist locks-in on the self-same nature of a thing, and walls it up into the category of a singular species, holding it in prison there, fixating upon it as that thing.

But if one is a nominalist–a “name only” sort of person–one can unlock the prison door. To echo the poet William Blake from his The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the gates of perception can be cleansed:

If the doors of perception were cleansed then everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.

In other words, if one is a nominalist one can relax into complexity, multiplicity, and change. One is not urgent to reduce something to one thing–one definition–but can be open to experiencing the world as what the physicist Carlo Rovelli calls “events in relation.” A nominalist disperses a thing’s “powers” into the play of systems, macro and micro.

The world is let out for play and air.

Nominalism challenges fanaticism. The nominalist’s plurality of perspective functions to tamp down fanaticism. A nominalist names to pragmatic taste, not getting too hung up as to what a thing is “really.” By exercising imagination and emphasizing the particular, a nominalist can even observe things as sui generis. In other words, something can be seen as one of a kind; an alcove with its own inner logic within the cosmic cathedral, subject to no final reduction to a singular species category.

So relaxation in definition loosens the doors of the heart and the grip of essentialist, monomaniacal fanaticisms, such as antisemitism.

G. K. Chesterton, antisemitism, and woke feminism. It’s not widely talked about, but G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936), the novelist and biographer of the great medieval essentialist, St. Thomas, was an antisemite. He argued that the essential nature of Jews is to be alien, and thus Jews could never really be British. Not essentially. According to Adam Gopnik in his recent book, Chesterton actually proposed different clothing for British Jews, so that they could be readily identified by others, as to their essential nature.

So the controversy over the woke women philosophers that a self-described postliberal essentialist like Feser links to and calls “woke fanatics” raises the question of what makes them fanatics in the first place. Insofar as the particular philosophers in question–Kathleen Stock, Holly Lawford-Smith, and Julie Bindel–are fanatics–and I think it’s fair to say that they may well be–then they are fanatics because their own definition of feminism is too essentialized and narrow (not imaginative enough). They appear to be, if Daniel Kaufman is to be believed, locked-in on treating opposing articles by feminists as essentially alien to their own articles and feminism, not really belonging alongside them in the play of signifiers, exactly like Chesterton perceived British Jews in relation to British Gentiles.

So if there are some female philosophers associated with woke feminism that are indeed fanatics, and essentialist philosophers like Feser don’t like what they’re doing to the discipline of philosophy, the irony is that the very source of their fanaticism might well be associated with the degree to which they lapse into essentialist modes of discourse in the first place.

So maybe the otherwise nominalist “woke” are not quite so “woke” after all, and maybe the otherwise essentialist “unwoke” should be hoping for a more consistent revival of nominalism.

__________

For those who think I’m being a bit harsh in calling Chesterton an antisemite, cute as he is with his doggy, I refer you to Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker piece on Chesterton, which rehearses his antisemitism pretty thoroughly: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/07/07/the-back-of-the-world.

The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world. . . . [E]very action admits of being outdone. Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.

In other words, to borrow a phrase the philosopher Daniel Dennett is fond of, “Whatever you can do, I can do meta.” That is, if you cognize (think), I can metacognize (encircle your thinking; think about your thinking—and think beyond your thinking). And you can in turn meta-metacognize about my thinking (think about my thinking about your thinking, and so on). Each moment is a fresh framing of the world—and this reframing goes on ad infinitum, and frequently in the face of fierce waves of resistance. But the strong spirit, says Emerson, will not be denied:

The key to every man is his thought. . . . But if the soul is quick and strong, it bursts over that boundary on all sides, and expands another orbit on the great deep, which also runs up into a high wave, with attempt again to stop and to bind. But the heart refuses to be imprisoned; in its first and narrowest pulses, it already tends outward with a vast force, and to immense and innumerable expansions.

So one frame overtakes the other. See it one way, then another.

Jacob wrestles the angel. In the Hebrew Bible (Genesis 32: 22-31) is the story of Jacob wrestling an angel through an entire night and into the next morning—and with this climax of words exchanged between them: “And he [the angel] said, Let me go, for the day breaketh. And he [Jacob] said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me” (32:26 KJV). The angel famously relented, granting Jacob a blessing. Likewise, Emerson’s is a vision of struggle between the binding and loosing of energies, but not between angel and human, but between contending visionaries. Like Seneca, there is no room for plagiarism or cliché for Emerson. Plagiarism and cliché are too easy—and contrary to new life, new thought. Emerson is not about imitation, but making it new. Each breakthrough in insight by one person becomes, for another person, a potential obstacle in the future to the apprehension of a still greater whole, or at least another aspect of the whole. So if we stand, as it were, on the shoulders of giants (those creative precursors to our own thinking, and who brought us this far), it’s also true that their powerful framing of the world can make it difficult to see differently, and to see beyond them. In this insight, Emerson thus echoes St. Paul (“For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face”). For the adventurous writer, the future promises ever greater clarity of vision. You can never see too well, and there’s always more to see. For Emerson, that is life.

Agon: writer wrestles writer. In this next passage of Emerson’s, his emphasis is on one person overtaking another in creative insight (“Lo! on the other side rises also a man,…”):

Every ultimate fact is only the first of a new series. Every general law only a particular fact of some more general law presently to disclose itself. There is no outside, no inclosing wall, no circumference to us. The man finishes his story, — how good! how final! how it puts a new face on all things! He fills the sky. Lo! on the other side rises also a man, and draws a circle around the circle we had just pronounced the outline of the sphere. Then already is our first speaker not man, but only a first speaker. His only redress is forthwith to draw a circle outside of his antagonist. And so men do by themselves. The result of to-day, which haunts the mind and cannot be escaped, will presently be abridged into a word, and the principle that seemed to explain nature will itself be included as one example of a bolder generalization. In the thought of to-morrow there is a power to upheave all thy creed, all the creeds, all the literatures, of the nations, and marshal thee to a heaven which no epic dream has yet depicted. Every man is not so much a workman in the world, as he is a suggestion of that he should be. Men walk as prophecies of the next age.

“Men walk as prophecies of the next age” chimes nicely with Percy Bysshe Shelley’s (1792-1822) notion that poets are the “unacknowledged Legislators of the world.” What is a poet, after all, but a generator of fresh visions, metaphors, and frames for seeing? Poets, like legislators, declare and define boundaries, and the way things shall be interpreted: This is that…. Meat is murder….This autumn leaf is my love….

New wrestles old. Like the politicians who make the newest laws, so writers make new laws for vision, crowding out the old, and judging them. Shall they stay or shall they go?

Step by step we scale this mysterious ladder: the steps are actions; the new prospect is power. Every several result is threatened and judged by that which follows. Every one seems to be contradicted by the new; it is only limited by the new. The new statement is always hated by the old, and, to those dwelling in the old, comes like an abyss of skepticism. But the eye soon gets wonted to it, for the eye and it are effects of one cause; then its innocency and benefit appear, and presently, all its energy spent, it pales and dwindles before the revelation of the new hour.

And so, nearly two decades before Charles Darwin would claim in The Origin of Species (1859) that life evolves by a process of relentless struggle and selection; and three decades before Walt Whitman would say that “the greatest lessons of Nature through the universe are perhaps the lessons of variety and freedom,” (“Democratic Vistas” 1867); and four decades before Friedrich Nietzsche, in his Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883), would liken human life at its fullest, not to something static or imitative, but to a bridge (an “over-going” and a “down-going”), Emerson posits the human spirit, at its best and most interesting, as a wrestler; as restless:

The continual effort to raise himself above himself, to work a pitch above his last height, betrays itself in a man’s relations. . . . Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations. The only sin is limitation. As soon as you once come up with a man’s limitations, it is all over with him. Has he talents? has he enterprise? has he knowledge? It boots not. Infinitely alluring and attractive was he to you yesterday, a great hope, a sea to swim in; now, you have found his shores, found it a pond, and you care not if you never see it again.

The only sin is limitation. Sophocles (c. 497/6 - 406/5 BCE), in his play Antigone (441 BCE), writes that “the only sin is pride” (being rigidly dug-in on an untenable position; not knowing your place and limitations). Emerson, in the passage immediately above, perhaps in a deliberate slight to Sophocles, has reversed this: “The only sin is limitation.” So it is that Emerson plays John the Baptist to the next wave of 19^th century creative geniuses—geniuses who would be thinking about the nature of change, evolution, and variety (Darwin, Walt Whitman, and Nietzsche) in ways that would disrupt the world:

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end. There is not a piece of science, but its flank may be turned to-morrow; there is not any literary reputation, not the so-called eternal names of fame, that may not be revised and condemned. The very hopes of man, the thoughts of his heart, the religion of nations, the manners and morals of mankind, are all at the mercy of a new generalization. Generalization is always a new influx of the divinity into the mind. Hence the thrill that attends it.

Absorb what Emerson is saying here. The writer with fresh vision is a fire-starter. Once a fresh vantage is put out onto the world, “no man knows what is safe, or where it will end”—not even the author. It can change how people look at everything. Speaking one’s mind honestly to others is like striking a match, endangering the dry structures around it that many, out of hope, sentiment, or nostalgia, hold dear. Honest, creative thought and writing is inherently dangerous, both to others and to the writer. It entails exposure; a risk that might bring praise and fame, but also blame and shame. It can make people tense. It can go viral (a virus is a fire). It can mean you get hated. It can mean you’ll come above the radar of authorities, threatening their agendas and power. But a good writer, like the silent Native American—“Chief Bromden” played by Will Sampson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)—escapes the compound.

Exposure and audience. So do you still want to write something new, declaring what you really think, putting it out into the world? If you do this, are you nevertheless going to attend to you audience’s sensibilities, bringing it along gently—or are you just going to say what you have to say, and hope it finds an audience—and that the audience keeps up? Perhaps you’ve concluded that you’ll make your own audience. If you build it, they will come. But do you want to take that risk, both in terms of rhetorical strategy and personal exposure? Are you sure about that? How strong do you think you are? Will you take Emerson’s advice in “Circles” to “make the verge [edge, margin, border] of to-day the new centre”?

Writing 2.10.1. “What’s that about?” “What’s the lowdown?” “What’s the bottom line?” Write something in your notebook or journal in which you draw a circle, figuratively, around an issue, reframing it from your own fresh vantage (the way you honestly see it). Move beneath the issue—or over it. Sniff out a subtext—or point to a horizon. Risk making the reader tense. Bring us to the bigger picture—or note an ignored detail that changes everything. Go high or low; observing forest or trees—or even a leaf in one tree. Make the reader see whatever it is you point attention to. Put the reader in-the-know. What’s x about, really? “You know what x is really about? It’s about…”

Experiment 5.2.2. Read out your insight—your take on what something is really about—from Experiment 7.1 to another person or persons and discuss it with them. Submit to what the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein calls “the temptation to speak.” Go in your discussion with your reader(s) wherever the reading out of your passage leads to. Hear your reader, and speak to your reader. Let the conversation go in the direction your writing seems to have prompted without any great concern for bringing it back on topic (whatever you thought that “ought” to have been in the first place). If your writing is a fire, notice what sorts of unpredictable conversations it starts, and the directions in which the fire burns.

The poet Homer, for Longinus, is the highest standard for imitation; he is the writer that both the historian Herodotus and the philosopher Plato read closely, looking for hints as to how their writing might produce in readers “wonder and astonishment” as opposed to language that is “merely persuasive and pleasant” (137). The distinction between wonder and something merely pleasant is important here, for Homer wrote more of sublime things (grand things, war, death) than merely beautiful or small things (items on a banquet table; a flower), as in this line from the Iliad (vi, 146): “Even as the generations of leaves, so are also those of men.” Leaves are beautiful, to be sure, but Homer emphasizes here their relation to life, death, history—and, implicitly, meaning (or rather, the seeming lack of meaning, as humans, from the vantage of cosmic time, come and go as leaves).

And here are some lines, also from the Iliad, in which Ajax—strongest of all Achaean (Greek) warriors in the poem—prays eloquently, but also sublimely, for the lifting of fog during war, the prayer having a literal and immediate meaning (Ajax beseeching Jove that his troops might see in the fog of war), but also a larger, existential meaning (Ajax perplexed by mortal, sublunary life—life as lived beneath the moon—with human vision lacking a higher vantage and played out in the fog of strife, the gods not interfering, but hidden and silent):

A veil of cloud

O’er men and horses all around is spread.

O Father Jove, from o’er the sons of Greece

Remove this cloudy darkness; clear the sky,

That we may see our fate, and die at least,

If such thy will, in the open light of day. (xvii, 644-47)

Agon. The way that Herodotus and Plato read Homer was, in Longinus’s view, not merely imitative, but agonistic (competitive, emulative, and rivalrous). If you’re a writer, you read a poet like Homer not just with the aspiration of learning from him, but of also matching or outdoing him: “Plato could not have put such a brilliant finish on his philosophical doctrines or so often risen to poetical subjects and poetical language, if he had not tried, wholeheartedly, to compete for the prize against Homer” (142). This idea of writing as competition was broadly shared by the Greeks, where, for instance, Athens’s most famous ancient playwrights (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes) wrote for competitions put on each spring in honor of the god Dionysus. In Freudian terms, we might also say that competition is oedipal (akin to a son attempting to vanquish a father to obtain access to power and mates). And the Yale literary critic Harold Bloom, also concerned with competition in writing, uses the term belated to describe the ambitious writer—belated in the sense that he arrives late to the party, a line of great writers having already written original things before him. If you’re a playwright, for instance, how do you write a better or more original play than one of Shakespeare’s? How do you explore the shifts and somersaults of the human mind and emotions better than Hamlet? But your deficit—your belatedness—is also your advantage. You cannot speak before Shakespeare, but Shakespeare cannot speak to your time. Only you and your contemporaries can do that. Will you find a way to address your era that Shakespeare didn’t already anticipate and rehearse? Can you, in the poet Ezra Pound’s phrase, “make it new”?

In goading you to making it new, Longinus recommends having great writers with a severe eye present to consciousness (143):

[I]t is good to imagine how Homer would have said the same thing, […] [G]reat figures [in the history of writing], presented to us as objects of emulation and, as it were, shining before our gaze, will somehow elevate our minds to the greatness of which we form a mental image. They will be even more effective if we ask ourselves ‘How would Homer or Demosthenes have reacted to what I am saying, if he had been here? What would his feelings have been?’ It makes it a great occasion if you imagine such a jury or audience […] and pretend that you are answering for what you write.

In other words, imagine great writers as your audience.

Immerse yourself in the atmosphere of books. It should be emphasized that by imitation Longinus is not advocating plagiarism. Rather, he likens the close reader of model writers to Pythia, famed priestess of Apollo at Delphi, who, when prophesying, stood in the midst of divine vapors that exhaled from a “cleft in the ground” (142). This provides a hint as to how steeped in the aromatic liquors of great books Longinus thinks the serious aspirant to sublime writing should be. Reading books should get you high, and you should bask in them as lovers bask in the sunlight of one another. If you want to be an exemplary writer, it makes sense to be a sensuous, cult-like devotee of sublime authors. The end, however, is not in losing yourself in another’s vision, but in learning, then finding, your own voice.

Seneca on novelty. Seneca, the Roman Stoic, writing in the same century as Longinus, was also concerned with competition and surpassing his mentors, himself inventing a new literary genre (form) of writing. Through his letter writing to his friend Lucilius, Seneca created the genre we now recognize as the essay. (Essay in Latin means attempt, as in an attempt to get one’s head around an issue.) Seneca’s letters, as a genre, tend to be short, focused meditations in an informal voice, directed to an intelligent reader, which in Seneca’s case is Lucilius. One translator of Seneca, in an introduction to his writings, observes that his “one hundred and twenty four letters to Lucilius comprise something entirely new in literature. For in these, which were his most conspicuous and immediate literary success, Seneca if anyone is the founder of the Essay” (Campbell 20).

In Seneca’s thirty-third letter to Lucilius, he addresses the dangers of over-reliance on the writings and thoughts of others. And midway through his letter’s cautioning admonitions, he writes the following:

‘Zeno said this.’ And what have you said? ‘Cleanthes said that.’ What have you said? How much longer are you going to serve under others’ orders? Assume authority for yourself and utter something that may be handed down to posterity. Produce something from your own resources. (80)

In other words, for Seneca, quoting authorities and leaving it at that amounts to intellectual outsourcing akin to plagiarism. It arrests one’s own thought, robbing a person of his or her chance at self-expression and self-development. To rely on the thoughts and words of others, with or without attribution, is to leave your own thinking to atrophy—or never to develop at all. “This is why,” says Seneca, “I look on people like this as a spiritless lot—the people who are forever acting as interpreters and never as creators, always lurking in someone else’s shadow” (ibid.). Instead, Seneca admonishes Lucilius to come out from the shadows and cease being a mere imitator of other people’s voices, memorizing their words and reciting them uncritically to others. An appeal to authority, or deploying its near cousins, plagiarism or mere summary writing, threatens to arrest thought. Seneca also writes the following on imitation, and with caustic brilliance: “a man who follows someone else not only does not find anything, he is not even looking” (81).

Outer v. inner direction. In thinking of rhetoric and writing as agon (struggle and competition), it may be useful to reflect on another influential philosopher: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). Hegel’s philosophy surrounding history and art is one of relentless conflict. His ideas influenced figures of his own century, such as Karl Marx and Nietzsche, and they continue to have a wide circulation among contemporary intellectuals today.

For Hegel, coming into ever greater self-consciousness through contest is what human beings are doing on Earth. Unlike other animals, whose consciousness—to the extent that they possess any—appears to be directed outward toward survival and reproduction, and not much else, human beings are frequently directed inward, toward an ever greater knowledge of themselves as geist (spirit).

Geist with a capital ‘G.’ And what is this spirit to which each individual is aware of possessing? Who are you, really? Hegel’s answer is that you are an emanation of the World Spirit—the Geist with a capital “G”—and that Geist comes into ever greater awareness of itself through you in conflict. In this sense, you’re special. You’re connected to the bigger world, and that world is channeling and clashing through you. You are a locus for forces of conflict. When Geist is mirrored perfectly back to itself by the world as a whole—that is, when the Geist’s essential unity with all that exists is realized in history, Hegel claims it will be the end of history. But since we’re not at the end of history yet, we are in a process of increasing self-awareness. That would be you.

Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. So how does self-awareness grow, according to Hegel? How do you discover who you really are? Hegel’s answer: by living; by crashing into people and things and learning what you’re made of. It is through life’s demolition derby that you discover whether, and in what sense, you are a noble dominator of existence or a mere handmaid to forces greater than yourself. Sometimes you’re being defeated and incorporated into some larger existence or goal that you didn’t choose, but to which you submit; at other times, you’re incorporating other people and things into your own larger existence and vision. In either case, Geist–the World Spirit–is coming to discover itself through you, history, and struggle. This is the dialectical movement of thesis (assertion), antithesis (resistance), and synthesis (unity). For Hegel, the ultimate dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis is when Geist and the universe face off in one last round and Geist wins, reaching a final unity on its own terms, and transcending history. In the meantime, we live in the midst of our peculiar Zeitgeist (the Spirit as manifested in our present age and culture), and rhetoric and writing might thus be thought of, in this state of affairs, as akin to what Carl von Clausewitz called politics: “war by other means.”

The Master-Slave dialectic: being for itself v. being for others. If you are what you eat and digest (or what you are eaten by and digested into), then where is this eating and being eaten taking place? For Hegel, there are four key arenas for the spirit’s struggle:

in physical labor (wrestling with material resistances to your existence and desires)

in ideas

in art

with others

With regard to others, your first experience of being self-conscious is in the breaking of your unity with them; of a recognition that you are not alone, but in a diverse world with diverse others which, as Hegel puts it in his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), have other “shapes of consciousness” from your own.

On encountering another person, therefore, you discover the paradox that your very existence as a “being for itself”—a self-assertive being—is dependent upon your also being a “being for others” (that is, a part of the object world of other self-assertive beings, potentially as their masters or in their service). If it is necessary for you to acknowledge that another person exists to realize your own self-assertive existence (this is mine; that is yours), it also follows that she or he must acknowledge you. And this leads to a face-off. What will be the terms of this acknowledgment? Whose vision will be essential and whose will be secondary or absorbed?

This dilemma is Hegel’s famous (or infamous) Master-Slave dialectic, in which two people, being “unequal and opposed,” and therefore not yet synthesized into a unity, must contend for dominance:

[T]hey exist as two opposed shapes of consciousness; one is the independent consciousness whose essential nature is to be for itself, the other is the dependent consciousness whose essential nature is simply to live or to be for another. The former is lord [Herr], the other is bondsman [Knecht]. (544)

And who is to be independent and who dependent is discovered in struggle:

[The lord’s] essential nature is to exist only for himself; […] he is the pure, essential action in this relationship, while the action of the bondsman is impure and unessential. […] The outcome is a recognition that is one-sided and unequal. (545)

Discovering inner power through work. In the Master-Slave dialectic, what does it mean to lose, to be a loser? Two things. First, it means to be “seized with dread,” for she or he has had a foreboding of the ultimate submission to death, “the absolute Lord.” In being “quite unmanned,” the loser trembles “in every fibre,” for “everything solid and stable has been shaken to its foundations” (545). In the loser’s upheaval, however, a substitute satisfaction is discovered that leads to a rediscovery of her or his own inner power, her or his “being for itself”: work.

In thought and physical labor directed to some triumph over a material problem, the bondsman rediscovers an inner strength that the lord does not enjoy. The lord, in deriving pleasure from material things by setting others to labor on her or his behalf, is actually alienated from the material world (one step removed). The bondsman, however, finds in the shaping of material reality (rather than shaping people or the master), dignity and self-knowledge:

[I]n fashioning the thing [as opposed to persons or the master], he becomes aware that being-for-itself belongs to him, that he himself exists essentially and actually in his own right. (546)

There is a great lesson for writers here. Writing–the command and control of words on a page–can empower the otherwise powerless and dispirited; it can recover in them their sense of being-for-oneself; of the possession of an inner directed purpose. Karl Marx was influenced by Hegel here, asserting that capitalism, in its exploitative nature and ever finer divisions of labor in the name of efficiency, alienates both workers and bourgeois consumers from full enjoyment of what is actually produced, undercutting the dignity that Hegel accorded to losers in the Master-Slave dialectic. So what human satisfaction demands, at minimum, on Hegelian and Marxist terms, is command over a process of fashioning from start to finish. A product made wholly by oneself (or in league with others, and owned by oneself (or in league with others). The generation of an excellent piece of writing, of course, is one way this satisfaction might be achieved, empowering an individual.

The symbolic, classical, and romantic in art. Since, for Hegel, the master-slave dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis is what spiritual beings, in their embodiment as humans, are up to, he applies this dialectic to ideas and art, which are also part of the historical process by which Geist comes to self-knowledge. With regard to art, for example, Hegel offers a very particular, three-stage historical progression for its evolution. These consist of “the symbolic, classical, and romantic” stages, and they represent the three strategies “in the striving for, the attainment, and the transcendence of the Ideal as the true Idea of beauty” (555).

Nature as wholly other—wholly alien—from you, and beyond your control. What Hegel calls “the symbolic” is art that focuses on setting before the mind one’s relation to alien nature: there is a whole world out there functioning independent of you and that does not submit to you. It defies your attempts at meaning. Hegel’s example is “the early artistic pantheism of the East” in which the subjects for art entail “even the most worthless objects,” and in which they may appear “bizarre, grotesque, and tasteless,” making any potential human victories over them seem futile (“null and evanescent”). This first historical form of art, “with its quest, its fermentation, its mysteriousness, and its sublimity,” sets out the terms against which any being-for-itself must struggle (552).

How Hegel’s speculation as to the first stage in the evolution of art might translate to the experience of the individual writer is in thinking about the first draft. It may present itself to the writer’s gaze as a hodgepodge of sentences and paragraphs without full coherence, perhaps lacking rhyme or reason. What is needed is a governing thesis that will make order of the disorder–but that thesis has yet to appear.

The Greek body in art as synthesis of spirit and Nature. Hegel’s “classical stage” is the art innovation of the ancient Greeks, in which Nature is overcome by man. The struggles and victories of the Geist—the Ideal spirit—are represented by the synthesis of the human spirit and body with Nature: “[P]ersonification and anthropomorphism have often been maligned as a degradation of the spiritual, but in so far as art’s task is to bring the spiritual before our eyes in a sensuous manner,” it is necessary. In other words, Hegel suggests that the fashioning spirit of the human being is mirrored and symbolized in depictions of the fashioning actions of the body, and the body fashioned (either nude or elegantly clothed). On Hegel’s account, the Greeks understood, as have subsequent sculptors and painters, that the human body is the intersection of spirit and Nature, for “spirit appears sensuously in a satisfying way only in its body” (553). Thus for Hegel the first two stages in the history of art emphasize Nature, particularly wild Nature, and the human spirit as thesis and antithesis: two forces to be reckoned with and brought into contemplation, then conflict (agon), then unity.

Thus the application to the individual writer could not be more clear: the rough draft, as first thesis; as wild nature; as first essay (attempt) at energetic thoughts put on the page, is now in need of an antithesis; a counter force for introducing order and discipline: the edit of the author.

Moving inward, toward Geist with a capital “G.” For Hegel, it belonged to the romantic stage to move art to its next level—not the synthesis of spirit and Nature, but the wholly inward turn—what Hegel calls “the inwardness of self-consciousness”; the synthesis of the human spirit with the Geist itself: “[M]an breaks the barrier of his implicit and immediate [animal] character, so that precisely because he knows that he is an animal, he ceases to be an animal and attains knowledge of himself as spirit.” This romantic turn is associated, for Hegel, with Christianity: “Christiantiy brings God before our imagination as spirit, not as an individual, particular spirit, but as absolute in spirit and in truth” (554). And so the “inner world constitutes the content of the romantic sphere […] its true reality and manifestation it can seek and achieve only within itself.” Thus it is that romantic art functions paradoxically: “[R]omantic art is the self-transcendence of art, but within its own sphere and in the form of art itself.” (555). In the romantic stage, one does not struggle to shape art into a mirror reflecting the union of spirit and Nature, but to somehow reflect instead the truth of one’s inwardness and power solely, though it is, literally speaking, invisible.

In other words, if we apply Hegel’s romantic stage of development to the writer, rather than the artist, the moment of beholding one’s final literary product is not from afar, witnessing a representation of wild nature synthesized with order, but as in a mirror. That is, one beholds in the writing oneself. The writing is one’s deepest, fashioning self made material; made flesh on the page. What is mirrored on the page is you.

What you see when you look in the mirror. In short, Hegel is a Jacob-wrestling-the-angel kind of person, and so, in answer to the question—How do I come to know myself?—his answer is: by encountering and attempting to shape the material world, ideas, art, writing–and even others–in such a manner that when you contemplate them, they are in your service, mirroring back to you your triumphant, independent, fashioning spirit. The objects and people you have influenced and fashioned in the world reflect you. You look at them and experience a form of self-consciousness: that’s me in material manifestation. Of course, if you look, and discover that they don’t reflect you well, or are independent of you, or are out of your control, then this makes for another form of self-consciousness. You become aware of your weakness; your defeat; of perhaps being a secondary and dependent being in service to them.

Writing 2.9.1. In a piece of writing, express empathy for a person, group, non-human animal, or ecosystem, and justify your empathy. Then write another piece in which you withhold empathy from a person, group, non-human animal or ecosystem, and justify the withholding. After writing your paragraphs, observe the contrasts in the feeling tones of the two pieces of writing, noting the different aspects of the human psyche they appeal to—the better and worse “angels of our nature.”

Writing 2.9.2. In a piece of writing, intermix some appeals to the conventionally better angels of our nature with some conventionally worse angels of our nature, and see if what you write possesses a more-than-usual interest. Is your writing more energetic than otherwise for entertaining such tensions—or does it feel less coherent, hopeful, and inspiring? (This experiment may entail working with a dialogical, as opposed to a monological, voice.)

Writing 2.9.3. The tone of your writing primes readers to adopt and track your attitudes and energies. But if you’re not careful here, you may lose them immediately. So imagine you are starting a longer piece of writing on a topic of your choice and ask yourself this question: “What angel of human nature should I try to evoke to start a piece of writing on my topic—humor, empathy, sobriety, cooperation, selfishness, enthusiasm, snark, lust, etc.?” After you pick either a better or worse angel of our nature to start the hypothetical piece, actually write a couple of sentences—or even a full paragraph—attempting to evoke your chosen attitude. After you write those opening sentences, read them out to another person and ask what tones of voice and energies your hearer actually inferred from them. You should be able to answer all of these questions: (1) What’s my topic? (2) Do I have a thesis and thesis statement that’s clear as a bell? (3) What’s my genre? (4)

Writing 2.9.4. Reflect on a writer you regard as exceptional and worthy of imitation. What makes their writing work?

Writing 2.9.5. Write a paragraph or more reflecting on competition, and whether it is something you take to be valuable in relation to writing. Do you think the ancient Greeks and Romans had it right, turning writing into an agon (a struggle with precursors and contemporaries)?

Writing 2.9.6. Select a paragraph from a book by a sublime author you especially admire and wish to emulate and write the paragraph out, word for word, by hand, slowly, noticing how the rhythm of the sentences function, how punctuation is used, etc. Then attempt to write some paragraphs in the style of that writer. Imagine the writer at your shoulder as your audience. Please and surprise them. Justify your authorial choices to them. Edit according to the suggestions you imagine them offering. Pretend you are them, the gifted and sublime author, and see what happens to your writing.

Resources:

A selection from Longinus’ On Sublimity begins on pg. 136 of The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (edited by of Vincent Leitch, et. al., 2^nd edition, 2010). An introduction to Hegel with selections from his Phenomenology of Spirit and Lectures on Fine Art can also be found in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (2nd edition, 2010), beginning on page 547.

__________

Concept 2.8. Selection and editing. The context for selection in writing is threefold. The writer has: (1) an end in mind—a thesis; (2) an audience in mind; and (3) some sense of the length-limit for the piece of writing. If, for instance, you’re an astronomer writing for a professional journal, your audience consists of professional colleagues—and the journal’s editor may generally accept no submission larger than, say, 8,000 words. If you’re writing a letter to the editor of a local newspaper, your audience is likely to consist of mostly nearby residents, and the editor may not accept letters longer than 200 words. So whether you’re writing something book-length or posting a tweet on Twitter, you don’t have an endless number of words and time to address everything, and therefore you must weigh your choices, making some points, but not others. In this sense, writing is always a zero-sum game: some words and ideas must necessarily win your favor, while others go unselected. There are victors and vanquished. What is essential and what can be discarded? How can the matter-at-hand be addressed most clearly—and with the fewest words? There is a process of efficiency-seeking at work. Like evolution, writing can be formidably “red in tooth and claw” (think of the school teacher’s dreaded red editing pen), and as such, it simply cannot escape its stakes and competitions. To echo the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834): may “the best words in the best order” win.

Change the environment, change the selection pressure. So writing is about choosing words and sentences for survival, and eliminating others. While writing, the author is constantly judging: “This seems like the best word choice for now; the best sentence; the best direction for this piece of writing.” But these judgments are subject to change. Imagine, for instance, after taking an hour’s break from writing, an author returns to her work and discovers the emotional weather inside her has shifted from pessimism to optimism. What then? Naturally, she’ll bring that fresh energy to what she has already written, scrapping some sentences and adding others. What was fine and worthy of survival in one hour may not be so in the next. The environment for selection has shifted. Notice how alike this writerly process is to Charles Darwin’s description of natural selection in the fourth chapter of On the Origin of Species (1859):

It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and intensibly [intensively] working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life. (504)

Exchange into Darwin’s passage the writer for natural selection, sentence for organic being, and her writing for the world and you have a startling description of the author’s actual profession:

It may be said that the writer is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout her writing, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and [intensively] working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each sentence in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.

Why “daily and hourly scrutinizing”? Because the environment for selection is constantly shifting in both mental and physical space and time. Moods shift in authors, readers shift, and history shifts. Whether a sentence is conserved in its integrity and form or is revised or eliminated depends on how well it proves to be adapted to the environments it encounters. Threats to its existence come from the writer who might eliminate it altogether, the reader who might ignore it, and the sheer ravages of time (the last book or data base in which it appears may go up in flames).

Shifting tastes in shifting environments. Writing is also like the selections surrounding taste. Imagine, for instance, a woman in a fudge shop, selecting three different pieces of fudge of different types (one is white fudge, one is without nuts, one with nuts). Now imagine she decides, an hour after purchasing them, that one of the pieces is insufficiently chewy, so she tosses it into the trash. Now the trash bin itself is a locus for selection, with ants in the role of potential consumers—or rejecters—of the fudge.

In other words, forms of selection are occurring in every moment all around us. We have selection on the producer’s side; selection on the consumer’s side. Think of the videos on the popular website “Funny or Die,” which either attract eyeballs or are eliminated. For a piece of fudge the motto might be “Yummy or Die,” attracting mouths—or, if we can imagine a conscious piece of fudge that doesn’t want to be consumed, it would be “Yucky or Die.” This latter formulation is the evolutionary strategy for survival of many species of beetles, which squirt acrid juices into the jaws of their predators. Darwin famously learned about this firsthand, to his chagrin. In order to catch three beetles on a specimen collection hunt as a young man, he held one in each hand and popped the third into his mouth—which he then quickly expelled in foul-tasting shock, the beetle scurrying away, uncaught. “Yucky or Die.”

“Interesting or Die.” Writing, in turn, has a general survival strategy of its own: “Interesting or Die.” Lionel Abel (1910-2001), an early contributor to Partisan Review, in an interview from the mid-1990s, said this about the Russian revolutionary and author, Leon Trotsky:

He had a literary verve which was unmistakable. He was a great journalist. And the intellectual power of his criticism of the Stalin regime…[is] accepted nowadays as justified, that he was right. But we didn’t know he was right. We knew he was interesting. And, in a way, if you lived in the Village [Greenwich Village in New York City in the 1930s], what was interesting was right. Certainly, the uninteresting was wrong. I’m not willing to altogether give that up, even today.

The rough draft as material for selection. Writing is about seeing the sentences that occur to you in your mind as wriggling forms of life, then giving them material form—one’s thought-worms made flesh, as it were—by laying them out in front of you on the page and seeing what happens from there. To extend the metaphor: the writer’s organelles are letters; her organs, words; her organisms, sentences—and once those sentences get started, they suggest other sentences—they breed other sentences. By the time the writer is done with, say, a twenty minute round of writing, perhaps her words have come together nicely to transform into a single, vivid, ecological community of sentences; a little system of relations on the page (a paragraph or two of argument or observation; a lyric poem, etc.).

Idea therefore leads to idea, thought to thought, as when the poet Robert Frost (1874-1963) wrote of his path through an autumnal woodland that branched unpredictably into new paths, way leading “on to way.” The writer is a pathfinder, unwinding sentences onto the page, then choosing further paths out of those sentences to still other sentences. And at some point the writer steps back to see where he or she has been. This is where editing begins.

Editing. The first step in writing is to just relax into the process of making initial selections among the ideas that occur to you. (“X comes to mind. I think I’ll say something about x. No, y is better. Yes, I’ll write about y instead.”) The second step is to get your thoughts about whatever it is you’ve decided to write about to flow out of you as actual, material sentences on the page. At this stage, you want to bring the stakes down on yourself, not over-fretting about perfection, completeness, grammar, or perhaps even coherence. It’s okay to make mistakes at this point. You know that writing is a process of imaginatively unleashing material, then chiseling it back. These sentences will be subject, soon enough, to later selection and correction in editing, so for now you let things fly. To let things fly naturally entails attention, not just to rational thoughts, but emotions. As the journalist and author Robert Wright concisely puts it, “emotions are judgments”; they are what surface in the writer as conclusions your brain has subconsciously–and perhaps quite quickly–worked out about such things as aptness of phrase and aptness of direction as they occur to you: “Yes, this phrase is good, this direction is good; these feel right.”

The sequence of selection thus proceeds from mind to emotion to material sentences to editing. At each of these steps you are imaginatively venturing outward to new ideas (“word are birds”), then back to the nest of four things:

(1) the music of your sentences together (how your language is flowing)

(2) your audience (the ear you are writing for or the group you are writing to)

(3) the piece of writing’s length limit

(4) your thesis or end (think in Shakespeare of the ghost of Hamlet’s father urging the ever erratic Hamlet not to forget his “almost blunted purpose”)

These four function together as form putting pressure on your flights of novelty, even as your flights of novelty put pressure on form.

Artificial vs. natural selection. So editing is where the writer’s actions have their most obvious analogy to artificial selection as opposed to natural selection. Before the eye of a writer are a variety of sentences gathered like dogs in kennels or roses in greenhouse beds, and just as the breeder of dogs or the cultivator of roses has a collection of specimens before her eyes, and an end in mind, so it is with the breeder and editor of sentences. The writer possesses what blind nature cannot have: an ironic perspective on the forms of life she has already generated. From your writerly vantage, you enjoy distance, and can cultivate what you want to say, cutting back on some words and allowing others to suggest still other words. Hence do your surviving words become “fruitful and multiply,” but to an end in mind: your object. If your sentences are organisms and your paragraphs little communities of organisms, your end may be to gather these communities into a greater ecosystem of interrelation, sending it forth as an essay or book–which might then undergo yet another form of selection by readers, perhaps going viral.  

Richard Dawkins. For being an early and vigorous defender of the theory of evolution by natural selection against its critics, 19^th century biologist Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) became known as “Darwin’s bulldog.” In the late 20^th and early 21^st century, the sinewy and quick-witted Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins (b. 1941), in his equal enthusiasm for the power of evolutionary explanation, has been called “Darwin’s greyhound,” and in his seminal 1976 work on evolution, The Selfish Gene, he argues that what underlies all of life’s activity is the reproductive imperatives of genetic material: a chicken, as it were, is an egg’s way of making another egg; an anthill is a way to make another egg-filled queen ant, and so on. Dawkins in turn argues that human languages, being codes for carrying information, function analogously to genes, moving words, phrases, and ideas about like viruses from mind to mind, some being more successful at provoking humans to attend to them and reproduce them than others.

Memes. In the last chapter of The Selfish Gene, Dawkins coins a term for the viral and replicating nature of human cultures and languages. Cleverly mashing echoes of the words mimesis (imitation) and memory with genes, he calls those bits or clusters of culture and language that go viral memes. Memes, like genes, are replicators. Among their potential iterations, memes can travel small and independent (“Got milk?”), can mutate (“Got beer?”), and can also be carried along in larger memetic clusters (as in the familiar phrase from the 23^rd Psalm—“The Lord is my Shepherd . . .”—in the King James Bible).

An obvious example of a meme is the repetition of the phrase “I prefer not to” by Bartleby, a copyist in a 19th century law office, in Herman Melville’s well-known short story, “Bartleby the Scrivener” (1853). In Melville’s story, the phrase comes to infect the minds of the copyist’s employer and coworkers, and it has even taken on a life of its own outside of the story itself, becoming readily associated with all forms of passive resistance to authority, from Henry David Thoreau and Leo Tolstoy in the 19th century, to Gandhi and Martin Luther King in the 20th.

Here’s Dawkins from the last chapter of The Selfish Gene: “Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes, fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches” (206). There is a cultural catch-all quality to Dawkins’ use of the term, and thus the takeaway, for the writer thinking memetically is to attend, not only to the content and syntax (word order) of what one says, but to the material style of communication—for these too are potentially memetic. Just as, for instance, physical building arches communicate an architect’s purposes and style to viewers, so do the writer’s letter arches to readers, as when a sans-serif font like Helvetica (a font lacking small lines at the end of strokes) goes viral in advertising, becoming ubiquitous in culture as a font associated as clean and modern in feel.

Here are two additional, memorable sentences from Dawkins using either the term “meme” or “memes”: “If a meme is to dominate the attention of a human brain, it must do so at the expense of ‘rival’ memes” (211), and “When we die there are two things we can leave behind us: genes and memes” (214).

Writing 2.8.1. Try imitating evolution, making way lead “on to way” (in the poet Robert Frost’s phrase). Start a path for thoughts. Write a paragraph or two in which you write exactly 200 words, no more or less, on any topic of interest. As with artificial selection in the breeding of dogs or roses, have an end in mind and an audience. While writing, notice your mental process of selection and elimination. You might say to yourself, for instance, things like the following: “What sentence most smoothly and naturally clarifies or builds upon the previous sentence?” or “This seems like the best word choice for now; the best sentence; the best direction for this piece of writing.” After writing a bit, go back and look at what you’ve written and interrogate each sentence with questions like these: “Why that word in this sentence and not another?”; “Why those words in that particular order?”; “Why that sentence next, and not another?”; and “Do the sentences move along smoothly and rhythmically together?” Alternate between writing and noticing what’s driving your choices in the writing. Attend to your feelings as you write (recall that “emotions are judgments”). Again, fiddle with the writing until you’ve shaped it into something consisting of exactly 200 words. A little organism, as it were. 

Writing 2.8.2. If, in 2.8.1, you generated 200 words, look at what you have and write another paragraph or two explaining to yourself the processes of selection you went through to get those words onto the page. Be a naturalist here. What’s the story you tell yourself of how your piece of writing came to be? What’s holding your paragraphs together as paragraphs (as opposed to just being a series of disconnected sentences)? What seemed essential to keep, and what inessential—and why? If you feel you’ve made something alive, ask yourself whether it is Leonardo’s symmetrical and harmonious Vitruvian man, or something more akin to a Frankenstein’s monster: a piece from here, a piece from there; a thing ugly, and perhaps even worthy of destruction. As the standard for evaluating your writing, think “Interesting or Die.” Is what you’ve produced worthy of going on? Who or what decides?

Writing 2.8.3. Take what you’ve generated from 2.8.1 and give it an edit. Edit at the level of word choice, word order (syntax), tone of voice, musicality, and energy. See if you can breathe some more life and interest into your piece of writing than it has now. Perhaps, in your edit, additional thoughts will occur to you. Get those down as well. Let the writing grow a bit beyond their existing 200 words, but do not exceed 300 words. To give yourself additional ideas for writing and editing, ask yourself what environments they might encounter and how you hope to delight or interest the readers in those environments with what you’ve written (perhaps some fellow students you are taking a class with right now; perhaps yourself ten years hence, stumbling on the paragraphs again; perhaps a person a century from now flipping through your journal on sale at a thrift shop, etc.). What environment(s) are you aiming your words at? Momento mori (remember death; remember the limits placed on you by space and time); momento delectus (remember your power of selection in the situations and moments available to you).

Writing 2.8.4. Discuss what you wrote in 2.8.1 with one person or more, focusing on the issues you wrestled with as a writer. Is the writing working?

Writing 2.8.5. Write a paragraph to an individual you can speak with immediately after doing so (either by phone or in person), gambling on an argument that you think might persuade him or her to feel, act, or adopt a belief of your choosing. The purpose of this experiment is to gamble on an audience, then get immediate feedback from that audience as to the pay-off—or failure—of your argument. Was your argument persuasive to the person? Did you hit or miss the goal of your writing?

Writing 2.8.6. Pick a topic and write three completely separate paragraphs on it. To be clear, don’t write one piece of writing with three paragraphs, but three separate pieces of writing of one paragraph each—all on the same topic. Your goal here is to have three different, full paragraphs with different starts so that you can then choose the one you think is best after setting all three aside for a time. (After writing, you may have to set the paragraphs aside for at least a full day to really bring a fresh eye to them). As with three pieces of music, each paragraph will start differently, and so acquire its own unique tone and logic from its first “note” to the last. So try this. Select three of the below words or phrases to get you started on three completely separate paragraphs. Let them set the beat for your writing. Start one paragraph with one word or phrase, the second with another, etc. In part two of the book, we’ll refer to such phrases as mutagens—agents of change. (See the book’s Introduction for a discussion of mutagens.)

Once … Consider … Contrary to … It is … It was … One day … In the past … Have you ever … Although … It is a well-known saying that … It is well known that … After … The subject of x has become … Over the past x years … As we start … At the beginning of … Perhaps … Like most … Roughly speaking … I … In light of the recent … While it is true that … Contrary to popular opinion … Contrary to x …  Imagine … Visualize … On the one hand … Back in the day … In the past … One the ironies of existence … At one time I thought … At one time … I’m interested in x … I’m an x … For me, … What, where, when, why, how [as in, raise a question: “What do you suppose it would be like to live with perfect courage?”; “Where in our culture is stillness and quiet valued?” etc.]… I recently … The recent story of … Recently … Have you noticed …

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