Something Other dialogue (9)

For weeks now, the words “Medium reply” have been on my to-do list, alongside “Patreon copy”, “Monotony documentation”, 12 things I want to write for the Chris Goode & Company blog, the lexicon I’m compiling for Unfinished Business, and a frenzy of ideas for blog posts for the umpteen different spaces I write in, all of which remain unwritten. I am writing constantly, thinking constantly about writing, and yet so often this feels like a meaningless churn. And saying that distresses me, because I’m in the extraordinary, hyper-privileged position of very, very rarely taking on writing work only for money. Everyone I’m working with just now is someone who interests me, even inspires me, and/or is giving me an opportunity to try something slightly different. So where is this dissatisfaction coming from?

I think it’s from all the things you were thinking about and responding to when you wrote (what isn’t called) instalment 8, in January 2016. At the time I couldn’t answer it; I’m not sure I can now. But I know it wove its way into my thoughts, so much so that your thoughts became my thoughts. (I’m enjoying this about Something Other, that sense of not quite knowing where your thinking ends and mine begins.) I know, too, that I wrote how I wrote in January because of that post. What I wrote about, specifically, was responsibility: the responsibility of people like me, us, to write our way out of inequality. Not an inequality I/we experience my/ourselves, first hand, except as people who have. Inequality as a systemic framework that needs to be dismantled, gently or violently, later or (preferably) sooner, to be replaced by …

Well, what? That’s always the sticking point: the not-knowing. Beyond the obvious socialist-feminist idealism, that is, which isn’t so obvious to enough people that it’s anywhere near becoming a reality. And so I write to know more about it, this future I’m trying to dream my way into. But increasingly I recognise that I’m doing so with a language shaped by imperialists, colonialists, racists, misogynists, who used as their building blocks the language of people who created an idea of democracy that excused inequality and traded vulnerable humans as slaves. This isn’t a language I want to bring into any future that has any genuine relationship with my ideals.

I might have carried on not writing a reply to you, except for reading a book last week that right now I feel I could re-read every year for the rest of my life and still not have read it enough. It’s 39 Microlectures: In Proximity of Performance (and already that one word proximity gives me a new way of describing what I do) by Matthew Goulish, and in many ways it’s the ur-text I’ve been looking for, in all our conversations about historical precedence. For the past five years I’ve been trying to write versions of this book; I’ll spend the next 35 trying harder. Which feels in some ways like a daunting task, but Goulish himself makes it less daunting by the way he writes: versioning, rewriting, finding his own words through the words of others, finding what he thinks through other people’s thoughts. His footnotes are as involving and entertaining and vital as the text itself: they are the text itself.

In a set of microlectures titled What Is a Book? he writes:

“Like science and politics, our words have betrayed us: our languages, our silences, complicit in our violent and complex poverty. … No matter how responsible, irresponsible, how personal, wise, or innocent, how clear or unintelligible our creations, we feel they commune in devalued currencies, in criminally suspect vocabularies.”

In his footnotes, he attributes these words to John Wittier Treat, page 27 of the book Writing Ground Zero — Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb:

“No more words: language, its reliability already devalued by philosophy, has become almost criminally suspect in the wake of world wars. It has even collaborated in our collective victimhood. … ‘What words can we now use,’ mused writer Takenishi Hiroko in an essay on the potential of language after August 6th. ‘What words can we now use, and to what ends? Even: what are words?’”

To what ends. Most of the ends to which I use words strike me as pitifully self-indulgent. I don’t use them to write to MPs or to speak in local council meetings, to petition against injustice or tell the stories of refugees. I write against capitalism, against racism, against prejudice, against inequality, but then I slip those words into pockets of the internet where only people who already agree with me — for the most part, people who have shaped the way I think — will encounter them. I might as well stay silent: especially considering how overwhelmed we all are now in words, tsunamis of words crashing every day into our lives on the internet, my voice a wave among all those waves, destroying people’s sense of well-being with their clamour and prolixity.

I might as well stay silent: and yet here I am, writing. Pushing this up the list of writing I want to do, which doesn’t even have listed on it the writing I most want to do. I think I know that silence would be the ultimate apathy. I think I know, too, that even if I took the life-changing decisions to become someone who works not as a writer but with people less privileged than me — with refugees, or sex workers, or people in prison, or disadvantaged children, or… — it still wouldn’t be enough. I would still feel overwhelmed by the number of people I wasn’t helping. [Note that this is now the third time I’m editing/rewriting this paragraph, and this time I’m making the decision to delete everything that came after this. How telling that this is the thought for which I can’t find the words.]

Inevitably, the microlectures that most made me giddy were the ones to which Goulish gave the title Criticism. Quoting (not quite accurately) a story that Isaac Babel told about his grandmother, who responded to his childhood intention to be a writer with the instruction, “To be a writer, you must know everything,” Goulish writes:

“Faced with the impossibility of the task of knowing everything, we sometimes feel the desire to reject intellectuality altogether in favor of passionate expression. Such expression may take the form of the urgently political, the assertion of a solidified identity, or the following of individual inspiration wherever it may lead. And yet even these roads, if sincerely followed, lead back to the discourse of complexity.

“We have no choice but to accept this terrain, with the hope of discovering its exhilarating creative possibilities. Such acceptance requires a softening of the dividing lines between traditional differences: artist and critic, passion and intellect, accessible and hermetic, success and failure.

“We must ask not only how to engage the critical mind, but also why. Any act of critical thought finds its value through fulfilling one or both of two interrelated purposes: 1) to cause a change; 2) to understand how to understand. As creative and critical thinkers, we may find it rewarding to attempt works of criticism, which, over time, reveal themselves as works of art.”

I recognise Goulish’s first purpose: I write to cause a change, first in myself, changes in the way that I think, the way I bring up my children, the way I care for my friends, none of which are what I feel they should be at this time. [Another interjection, some 20 hours after first clicking publish: I realise the words ‘first in myself’ seem to contradict the impulse to write towards social change. Surely I would be aiming to change people more widely? But to claim as much feels egotistical, hubristic. I am humbled and grateful on the rare occasions when people write something that responds positively to something I’ve written. Humility feels like an important quality to foster, and I’m not sure I can balance that without qualifying the statement “I write to cause a change.”]

I am still some distance from the second. The more I write, and in particular the more I read of other people’s writing — yours, Chris’, Rajni’s, Selina’s, Ria’s, Audre Lorde’s, Rebecca Solnit’s, and on and on — that most influences and inspires me, the less I understand how we continue to live in the world as it is, rather than the world of possibility we envisage. But then, that terrain Goulish talks about is the one I feel I’ve been exploring these past few years, tentatively feeling my way forward. For as long as I’ve known you, you’ve been a torch in that darkness. For all my misgivings about meaningless churn, I do find it rewarding to attempt works of criticism that might, one day, reveal themselves as works of art. And I am torn between wanting them to have a higher purpose than that, a political purpose, and knowing that in saying so my Thatcherite mentality is betraying itself again: because art is the higher and political purpose itself.