Totemification
We grossly over-estimate how easily we can stretch our will across time. Even the simplest action, a nightly journal—this—, which feels so achievable in the rush of inspiration, now feels impenetrable at a night’s end, while guiding at baby’s bottle at the end of my chin, typing into my phone to keep a streak, hoping to cobble some unexpected essay in the moment. I have no topic in sight; whatever lies ahead will emerge only through association.
I have a bulging vault of wisdom, but it’s all forgotten and I have little time to comb through my archives, so it lingers at the edge of my consciousness, always taunting. That is over dramatic. What I mean is I feel like I’ve grasped important truths, but let them slip away. It is not enough to hold the truth once. The moment you take your eye off it, which happens almost immediately, it’s like you never had it; even a seemingly shattering insight will slither away each day until it has to be relearned again, though I imagine each time it’s slightly easier to learn—and each time you remember how easy forgetting is, how hard it is to metabolize anything.
I suppose this is one form of overthinking. I suppose I could trust the process; the fallibility of memory is a feature—if I can’t remember something, if it doesn’t imprint on my character with ease, then it’s probably not important enough to remember. This is the default, and perhaps the personal default is the global default, applied across populations, and so in the end one’s inner nature is so consequential that it’s of no use worrying or fighting it; all cards fall into place.
The opposite approach is to build a hypnomnemata; an organized palace of insight, returned to at semi-frequent intervals, to reinforce found lessons. It’s not enough to build a writing archive of a million words; there is follow-up work in turning sap to syrup, in compressing essays into aphorisms, in categorizing them, and in returning to the right silo of thought when some new trouble looms, monthly, in endless undulations.
Returning to an idea is really a form of prayer. Prayer need not be religious or denominational; prayer internalizes meaning of any kind. I learned an idea for Iris Murdoch that sticks with me: she says that, in any moment, your decisions and actions may be predetermined, however it’s not determined by fate, but by the nature of your attention in the minutes, hours, days, and years preceding that moment—in your down time, you have autonomy in how you pay attention. She’s trying to make the case that attention itself is consequential; it shapes your character and your character shapes your decision making.
This model definitely applies to writing too. My output on any given day is contingent on what I’ve absorbed in the days and weeks before. This is often accidental, but it need not be. To improve at writing, it’s rarely about learning some rule, acquiring a meme, or purchasing a trick, but in shaping your mind through deliberate attention so that some quality emerges from the subconscious in the future.
I suppose this is all surfacing because we just read Virginia Woolf in Essay Club and I’m in awe of her technical brilliance, again. I’ve reverse engineered her, years back, and can’t quite trace how much of that, if any, sunk in—either it was foundational or it never cohered. In any case, at one point years ago it felt like I really understood her, and yet now I am again seemingly baffled. Did I forget? Do I need to reserve some hours to dissect? It feels like some percent of what I do, consciously or unconsciously, gets absorbed—but most is lost…
Or, figuring out how to retain your inspiration is perhaps the actual meta-skill to solve.
I wonder how much of my own Essay Architecture system is currently loaded in me as I write this. I am really just following the idea here, and whatever emerges, formally or stylistically, is merely accidental. I don’t doubt that my own ideas could be better loaded. There’s probably some “boot up” process, daily, weekly, and monthly, so that the right ideas continue permeating and anchoring in the subconscious. But would this be a chore?
What’s probably irking me is that I feel slightly detached from the vision of the essayist I want to become. It is natural to anchor this in heroes, the writers I admire; yet I see flaws in them; crucial differences—I know I am not them, yet in some fundamental way I don’t quite know what I am myself, either. It feels like I used to have a legible and explicit true north, but as you get better, you also realize how shallow and simplistic your old goals were. So there’s a chance I forgot and lost touch with them, but also an equal chance I just outgrew them, and now struggle to articulate what I want my writing to be.
What I strive for is a synthesis that can’t be easily prescribed into a method. I suppose this whole note is “essayistic,” in the sense that I’m barreling forward trying to answer a question—how does a self propagate and evolve through time?—yet it’s lacking in idea, form, and voice. By rational analysis, it’s missing almost every ingredient: no experience or microcosm, no references or response, a meandering structure unoptimized for reader attention, and a perhaps overly pragmatic voice with little poetry, despite some occasional metaphors and flare. I suppose I could fix this all in rounds of rewrites, but that is not in the cards for this idea; this will only ever be a captured thought stream; a true account of what’s going through my mind as I sprawl on the couch. Yet, if I my insights were “loaded,” would my first drafts be more poetic, more well-rounded?
To lob insights into the future, perhaps they need to be materialized into a totem. I look around my apartment and see nothing but my past carried forward: paintings from dead grandparents, paintings of the dead family dog who I watched get euthanized, architectural models from a summer abroad in Italy, a 1950s radio, our wedding flowers, an inherited library. Unlike my thoughts, it’s as if I couldn’t escape my past of I wanted to. While thoughts evaporate, possessions accumulate.
How can we cast our abstract epiphanies into stone? Is this reification? The totemification of everything? Where are the boundaries? What is the visual language to work within? And what is the ritual? I sense that post-it reminders fall short of emotional charge. On the contrary, I have a statue on my desk of a man with a book for a head, holding his skull in his hand, looking back at its book-head. This is symbolic and charged, yet I almost never see it. For months I walk by it with it having no effect. Even when I do see it, I see it too quickly to absorb it and for it to imprint on my consciousness. This means it’s not enough to load your inner quarters with odd assemblies, each with a story; there is an art of looking upon your collected interiors, in seeking the fixtures that blend in as something new, in remembering their message and recasting them into you.
To learn, then, is not just to behold knowledge once, but to totemize and worship it. The question is, to what degree can you achieve this? When do you know a factoid is worth totemizing? How many totems should one have, 3 or 300? How intricate of a ritual can I bear? I suppose there are mega-totems and mini-totems. A mega-totem is a larger frame that answers some foundational question, like what kind of essayist do I want to become? If the answer to that is Montaigne—it’s not, at least not quite, not in totality—then perhaps I need a framed picture of him I reflect on each morning. A mini-totem is far more granular; I notice how Woolf compressed her sentence lengths and uses rhyme in a moment of action; that’s 1 of 1,000 things to remember, and so that makes more sense in a digital hypnomnemata. For that to work, each idea needs to be like a Matryoshsa doll, where I can scan all ideas quickly before going deep on any.
It’s tempting to start making a hypnomnemata, but really I should start with the large totems, and really test how those can reverberate through my daily writing sessions.