On My Mind VI

Writing to Go On in Life

            A rough outline or a list of points and examples, a sketch of the argument, frees you from global worries. What is right for this sentence or paragraph? The rest will take care of itself, especially when you realize you can rearrange the parts so that you are in accord with your outline, or to reveal a more auspicious arrangement that by the way shows what is wrong with your original outline.

            As you go along, sentences lead to the next sentence, and you are more likely to persevere, your momentum making it harder to stop. Now you may write yourself into a corner. At that point you must stop and smell the roses. Return to writing the next day, and eventually you will find a way to write yourself out of that corner. You keep freeing, from yourself, what you need to say, so that you can see it all as a whole that might be restructured, the flow reversed, the main points freed from the matrix of decoration you have employed to bury them and make them inevitable. Nothing is inevitable. Rather what you are saying is contingent within the matrix of argument and evidence and story you have provided: It could have been otherwise. It is just this way.

            Unavoidably, you have left out some major points, points you may have discovered in the writing. So you have to make room for them, and that is not so hard to do since what you have written has a life of its own, detached from you. When readers actually read your text, they see it as it is, as just the way the story goes, the various rearrangements seamlessly present as a flowing stream of text and story and argument and description.

            You write so you can go on in life, to what is next. You edit and reconstruct what you have drafted out of duty and obligation, the other 90% of the work you acceded to when you started writing the first 90%. If your first drafts need only minor changes, you are blessed and extraordinary. If you are a great writer, and such are almost nonexistent in scholarship, there is nothing to say to you.

            If you cannot let go, if you cannot let your ideas and argument and criticism have a life of their own, you need to find work that allows for your possessiveness.

Describing

            If you think for a living, you have got to make your thinking public and accessible. You have to make your ideas manifest, so that readers believe that they might well have had such ideas and examples in mind but for their not being in your situation.

            So I have learned to describe by photographing or analogizing. As for analogizing, I think of mathematical and physical models as pointers to interesting features of the world and as placing a larger context in view. (Models drawn from the humanities work much the same way.) I have learned to attend to what is really going on (surely I might well be wrong), to be continuously trying to figure out what’s up, saying, Why am I here, reading this paper, listening to this lecture?  I have learned to make intuition and insights into real work, articulated, made concrete. I trust my intuitions because I make them trustworthy by what I do with them.

            I assume I can understand anything, for I can find a way to see it as something I already know if a bit different. Actually, of course, there is lots I cannot understand. But what I can comprehend is sufficiently wide-ranging that it might seem that “anything” applies.

            I allow myself to ask the questions that help me figure things out—especially the dumb questions whose answers “everybody” knows. My nose is pressed against the window glass, since I want to get in. I need to learn the secret handshakes, the ways people evidence their warranted competence and appreciation, although I may not be able to employ that handshake.

            Actually, I have done nothing, ever, except to teach, write, photograph, and bring up my son. No practical experience, no management or administration, no consulting. I never claim to be experienced or an expert.

            I think for a living. Except for physics, I know very little, and although I try to keep up, my physics is not refined by years of teaching and researching. I cannot employ theory from the social sciences or literary study or history, although I can recognize when such theory plays a salient role.

            I suspect that I can be readily bamboozled, but that does not stop me from inquiring and thinking. Being wrong is less a problem than being mute in front of phenomena.

              I do not do real work. Rather, my work is in the service of my making sense of the world for myself. (I do not play with ideas and see how they work.) My books are markers of how I figured out something; I wish others will find those markers of interest. But it is the figuring-out that gets me going. The writing makes the figuring-out rigorous and justified.