Friends:
I am writing this on a plane. My original intention was to set down these words in my spiral-bound notebook using the UC Santa Cruz banana-slug pen Quinn bought me ($3.50) at the campus store. But before I even opened the notebook, it was clear to me that ye-olde-ink-and-paper is a mode of expression that has basically ceased to be, as once it was, a serviceable extension of my thoughts. For better or for worse, my brain has reshaped itself (with admirable plasticity) to the demands of an Olympic-level Gmail regimen, which has me receiving and dispatching upwards of twenty-five paragraphs-long missives per diem, each positively humming with cute, personalized postscripts, colorful turns of phrase, and progressively overwrought punctuation. I’m a fucking machine.
So I admitted defeat. I stowed the notebook below the seat-back in front of me, never again to be excavated from the sediment of media history and chalked up this minor failure to the inexorable tug of world-historical forces. The page is dead; long live the screen. I write this, therefore, on my laptop, with the display brightness reduced to zero, such that keen-eyed persons in the aisle seats of rows 19 through 24 see me tippy-tapping nonsense words into an apparently inert computer (but imagine how crazy I would look if they could read this stuff!).
I like writing on planes. In the blogosphere, this is the kind of banal first-person observation that lends itself to dreamy musings on writing’s relation to the rapture of flight: the infinite freedom of language borne ever skyward on wings of thought, etc., etc. I would not like to read that essay, but I certainly would like to write it, if only that meant that my experience of getting words on the page (er, screen) were so full of ease.
Alas, it is not. If you have been reading Radicle Weft in recent months, you will know that this is far from the truth, and you will also be confusing me for some other writer, because I have posted nary a bullet since late April. Joe Biden was the presidential candidate back then. I haven’t written this millennium.
But spin this air-travel metaphor in the other direction and you get a description of writing that feels, actually, pretty realistic: a time-consuming commitment made livable only by the narrowest of physical conditions (tanks of oxygen, pressurized cabins, temperature controls) and squeezed by market pressures ($21 extra to nab an aisle seat with JetBlue) where the merest act of concentration is hijacked by legion flashing screens (Bohemian Rhapsody starring Rami Malek’s pursed lips in 18B, iPhone Pro 6 ad in 16D), all of it characterized by the sense that I would be better suited drinking orange wine on my terrace. I hate flying, and I fly regularly. I love writing, and I write infrequently. But combine the thing I hate with the thing I rarely do, and voila — I’m doing the thing, and enjoying it, too. Riddle me that.
There are lots and lots and lots of reasons not to write. The most obvious one is that there is just too much text out there already. When I was an undergrad, anytime my bookish energies ebbed I would leave my room to catch a contact high at Labyrinth on Nassau Street. There, I’d wander the tasteful pastel displays, linger over titles like Anti-Carceral Semiotics of the Potted Plant, and tingle with the thrill of how much there was to be said. There were so many books in the world, and it was that much easier to imagine that one day, one of them might bear my name.
But now I go to bookstores and all I feel is massively bummed. Most of these books will never be bought. Of the books that people do by, most will never be read. They will be arranged on hanging shelves made of repurposed timber, and maybe they will be color-coded. They will weigh on the conscience of their owners until they are forcibly pushed from the realm of visibility, at which point they will become, in effect, furniture. Why would I commit the contents of my mind to such a fate? My thoughts would make a lumpy couch.
Justin Smith-Ruiu posted a funny and depressing reflection on this fact back in March, where he considers the volume of words produced on a given day in terms of a great planetary water cycle:
“A figure I have come across repeatedly estimates that there were around 337,000 books published between 1700 and 1800… Let’s go ahead and double it, bringing the total number of 18th-century books to 674,000, at around 1MB each (let us say). And let’s double that figure in turn to include all the letters and notes and church baptismal scrolls and so on, so that there were, worldwide, a total of 1,348,000 MB of data, or 1.348 terabytes, produced in that hundred-year period.
In 2023, there were about 328.77 exabytes of data produced per day (the figure is surely much higher now, almost three months into 2024)… So, every minute in 2023 there were about 169,371 times more data produced than in the entire century that gave us, among other great achievements, the Encyclopédie.
Do you understand what this means? I am, right now, pissing into the ocean. Sure, I create a little cloud that brings about a few seconds of alteration in this nano-region’s pH balance. But the ocean doesn’t care, and almost immediately restores itself to its previous homeostasis.”
An upshot of Smith-Ruiu’s napkin math: not only are there infinite reasons not to write, but the degree of futility is, with each moment, an even bigger infinity than it was before. By the time I finish writing this paragraph, the proportion of my stake in the accumulation of human textual production will have actually decreased. Read this sentence. Proportionally, it is smaller now than when you started. With each word I write, I set myself deeper in the red. You’re walking backwards, man. Stop while you’re ahead.
No, really: stop.
A few months ago, I had an idea for an essay that purported to solve this informational glut. There was a long and storied tradition (so I would begin) of, wait for it: burning books. Caesar at the Library of Alexandria. The Nazis. Some other historical examples I was sure I could surface on Wikipedia. These bonfires were all reprehensible, I reasoned, not for the political ugliness of suppressing free thought or promoting hatred but because they eroded the conditions for the production of meaning. Burning books meant less ~poetry~. That was a bad thing. But at some date in the last twenty-five years (I would gesture vaguely at the Rise Of The Internet), we passed an inflection point beyond which the surfeit of information was increasingly inimical to meaning. Too many words! Too many images! We can’t think with all this noise, much less sound the depths of our own mortality!
The solution, I would propose, is FIRE: burn the books (or, rather, their digital equivalent)! Destroy it all (or most of the dumb stuff, anyway)! Bring the scale of available information back down to the scale of human thought. The same eclipse that had made our stores of data inhospitable to meaning-making had transmuted the harsh glare of reactionary fear to the glow of poetic insight. Book-burning was redeemed. From the ashes of this informational conflagration would emerge the chirpy fledglings of ambiguity and uncertainty and humility — the necessary commitments of a meaningful life.
The problem was, I couldn’t get the tone right. Was I seriously endorsing burning books? Or would I do couch it in an ironic, speculative, isn’t-this-the-cleverest-little-thought-experiment register? Could I do the Borges thing? What exactly was the Borges thing, again? or maybe I was endorsing burning books…
So that idea never saw the light of day. But I spent a good amount of time thinking about it, as well as a bunch of other essays that never materialized, either. This is all to the good. No lives were lost as a result. Most of you probably never even noticed I had gone dark! (A few of you, I admit, did ask me whether I would post something soon — and for that, I will love you, passionately and forever). And anyways, most of the energy I would have expended replacing em-dashes with less annoying sentence structures I directed, instead, towards good stuff. Worthwhile stuff. Like drinking orange wine on my terrace. Listening to Maggie Rogers, and my friend Trunino’s excellent album. Exercise. Cooking. I took my love Raiane on a food tour of Jackson Heights a few weeks ago. That was beautiful. If you’re looking for the best samosa in Queens, hit me up.
There are lots and lots and lots of reasons not to write. But the fact that writing is unaccountably demanding is not one of them. In fact, the difficulty of writing is one of its great virtues! I don’t mean this in some tired the-journey-is-the-destination, no-pain-no-gain way. I mean that nothing opens a window onto one’s inner life than the question of why, exactly, it is so difficult to spin it into language. To figure out how a clock works, you take it apart. But this presents a tradeoff: you can either tell time by it, or you can understand how it tells time. You cannot do both at once. (The same principle applies to a cadaver under the knife.)
By similar logic, my creative block has proven to be a deep well of reflection on the special kind of lunacy required to produce language in this strange historical moment. These insights have proven rewarding, but they have not, curiously enough, made me much more “productive.” Understanding is not the same as doing, which, as it happens, is not the same as being.
And I have been being. All of this time! 100% of it! Furthermore, I am happy to report that this being — in time, and place, with others — has been rich beyond measure. It is this richness of being to which I hold the pale, ghostly outline of what I might write, if I really put my mind to it, and judge, again and again, these imagined words to be lacking. Which is to say that my error has been to treat being and writing-about-being as equal substitutes. They are not. I have enough of my wits about me to understand that writing should serve being, and not the other way around.
That is simple enough. Trickier, though, is what to do about it. Is there a kind of writing that really, truly, brings one closer to the world? Grace Paley, they say, wrote her short stories at the kitchen table, in the middle of a crowded household. That sounds about as well-integrated as literature and life can be, but it would drive me fucking nuts.
The mystery abides. But mysteries are, if you don’t mind the mess, fertile ground for task-oriented persons like myself. And the task is before me: to write in such fashion that brings me into closer contact with the people and places that constitute my little world. If this comes at the expenses of (feigned) erudition and the prevailing conventions of writerly remove, so be it. In fact, that’s probably what the doctor ordered.
But the pilot has announced our descent, which means my precious window is closing. And there is so much I haven’t even gotten to yet: the exquisite afternoon I spent on a cold beach north of Santa Cruz with Amalia and Quinn, swinging long ropes of kelp above our heads and crouching beside tide pools at what we agreed was the End of the World; the unfamiliar thrill of my first ever jam session with Matthew; the quivery feeling of visiting my brother in a hospital bed; how senselessly I love California and how acutely it appears, to my eyes, a prefiguration of the horrors to come. All the stuff, in other words, that went down when I wasn’t poking away at this thing.
So next time I’ll get to that.
Write me: rustmenagerie (at) gmail (dot) com